


Highwaymen

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: Adam (2009), Charlie Countryman (2013)
Genre: Age Difference, Anal, Danger, First Time, M/M, Oral, Rutting, Switching, Theft, Violence, bonnie and clyde au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-05-27 20:06:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6298414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“What do you do?” he challenges back after a while. “If you’re not getting an education. Education gets you places, it can help you leave the state and get a good job that pays well to give you a comfortable life. Education is…” He stops for a moment, swallowing. “It’s a way out. It’s a logical and safe way out. So what do you do, if you find it such a waste of time?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Nigel lifts his eyes again, as egg drips from fork to plate.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“I rob banks.”</i>
</p><p>A Bonnie and Clyde team for the ages.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [solamentenic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/solamentenic/gifts).



> Beta'd by our incredible [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!!
> 
> A commission for our favourite mamacorn, our brilliant [wiith-my-hands](http://wiith-my-hands.tumblr.com/)!

“Breakfast?”

The young man lifts his gaze from the notebook he keeps stashed beneath the register, and he slides it back beneath. He squints against the too-bright light through dirty glass that darkens the man before him into shadow.

“Breakfast,” Nigel says again after a moment. “All day or already done?”

“All day,” he answers. “Please sit anywhere you’d like.”

Fingernails haloed with a corona of dirt push Nigel away from the counter. Broad shoulders and a narrow smile, straight spine and strong legs that carry him towards the booth at the back of the diner. He’s in a suit, of sorts, the kind of pale brown that doesn’t show dust. It’s losing a hem around one ankle, and his boots leave little flakes of mud behind on the tile floor.

“Most people like to sit by the window,” the young man volunteers from behind him.

“Then leave it for most people,” Nigel responds. There’s a bit of leather missing from the seat, and some stuffing coming out. He plucks at it a moment before sitting with his back to the wall. At the counter, the server gathers together his little notepad and pristinely sharpened pencil.

Nigel sighs, and settles his bones.

It’s a dump. They all are, and Nigel wouldn’t dare expect anything more this far out in the fucking boondocks. Little places like this get by on the same dozen farmers come ‘round for coffee in the morning, and maybe lunch just to avoid the heat outside. There’s a pair of them seated by the window, and Nigel studies them for a moment, their worn hands and etched faces.

Not cops.

Or at least not cops he’s at all concerned about.

“Menu?” he asks, when the kid comes close.

The young man shakes his head. “We don’t need one.”

“The hell kinda diner doesn’t need a menu?”

“I remember it all,” he answers. “It’s really simple. There’s a pattern to it -”

“And what if I wanted to look at my choices more than once?”

Here the young thing stumbles a little, perhaps put off by the fact that someone isn’t impressed by his incredible memory. He blinks, eyes blue and wide, freckles just beneath them. They darken when he blushes.

“I can run down the list for you as many times as you need to hear it,” he offers next, elegant fingers fidgeting with the notebook, pencil between the pointer and middle finger, shifting as he does. “From the specials to the hearty breakfasts, to those a little less harsh on the digestive system -”

He stops talking, licking his lips and biting the bottom one until it pales. With a sigh he lets it go, and Nigel finds that he can’t quite stop staring at it as blood returns to pinken it again.

“Would you like tea or coffee?” the server asks, resigned.

“Coffee.”

“Cream or sugar?”

“No.”

“No to one, or to both, or -”

“No,” Nigel says again, a little slower. “To both.”

The kid writes it down, or starts to anyway. Nigel lifts a hand to stop him but the soft scratching of pencil continues. Finally he reaches, a little too quick, and startles the young man’s eyes wide when he grasps his wrist. The server steps back suddenly and Nigel lets him go, hands held up in apology.

“Christ, alright.”

“Why did you do that?” the young man asks. “Why did you touch me?”

“I was trying to get your attention but you weren’t looking at me.”

“Why?”

“Because you were lookin’ at your goddamn notepad. Tell me why someone who says they’ve memorized a whole damn diner menu needs to write down ‘coffee’,” he asks, a brusque laugh rubbing rough.

“It’s for the cook, and for our records,” he says. “Please don’t do that again.”

“Shit, kid, alright,” sighs Nigel. He’s queer, this one, and Nigel resents that his strangeness plucks such curiosity in him. Fuck does he care about some twitchy kid in a diner? Nigel snorts, and fishes out his cigarettes to light one. “So are you gonna tell me breakfast or what?”

The young man, cheeks still as scarlet as if they’d been sunburnt, draws a deep breath. This time, he sees Nigel lift his hand to quiet him.

“Steak, rare. I mean real rare. Just run the cow through the kitchen and slap it on a plate.”

The kid blinks, swallowing hard. “That wouldn’t taste very good.”

“Just make it rare,” sighs Nigel, a cloud of smoke pooling and settling around him. “Two eggs, sunny-side up. You got potatoes?”

The kid nods. “What kind?”

“Any kind.”

“There’s three.”

“Fuckin’ pick one,” shrugs Nigel, wincing a little as he settles into the seat.

The kid jots it down and turns to go. Nigel watches every stride with a reluctant appreciation. Pretty thing. Big blue eyes and curly brown hair. Skinny, but he can’t be a day past nineteen and if he’s stuck working in this place then it figures he’d not have built up any muscle. It’s not a bad view, though, the drape of his grey wool pants across his ass. Loose enough to interest, and leave Nigel to wonder about what’s not framed tighter.

He’s back out moments later with the coffee, the mug slightly chipped on the handle but very clean. He sets the mug down before pouring the coffee in it, concentrating mighty hard on something so simple. Nigel considers reaching for him again, but remembers the genuine surprise and displeasure at the fact, and doesn’t. He’s a cad, but not a bastard.

Not often, anyway.

“What’s your name?” he asks instead. The kid straightens up and holds the coffeepot against himself.

“Adam,” he replies, finally. Then he turns to go, just like that. No small talk, no smile. Nigel has had waitresses hang on every word he doesn’t say, either skiving off work or finding him attractive or both. But this kid... 

When he returns about twenty minutes later, balancing a tray on one hand and holding the coffee pot in the other, Nigel hums and sits back.

“Steak,” Adam says. “Very rare. Two eggs sunny-side up. Fries were the easiest, and I brought you some hot sauce to go with them. More coffee?”

Nigel holds his cup out in answer, but doesn’t watch the pour on which Adam focuses so intently. He watches instead the way his brow creases with a single line across it, and how his lips part just enough to see his teeth past them. The crescents of white vanish when he’s done pouring, and Nigel blinks back to meet his eyes.

Or he tries, anyway. The kid looks just past him as if there’s someone just over his shoulder. Nigel shrugs away the nervousness this instills in him, as if it were a stray ember on his skin.

“Please let me know if you need anything,” Adam says, as he turns to go.

“I need something.”

Adam stops suddenly. Coffee pot still in hand, his shoulders draw up a little closer to his ears. “Yes?”

“Sit down.”

Adam’s eyes dart quickly to the side and back again. He doesn’t make a move to sit. He turns next to look behind himself, at the near-empty counter, at the kitchen that is calmly and comfortably managed by the two men who work within. When he turns back he doesn’t sit then either.

“Was there something wrong with the order?”

“No, I just want you to sit down.”

Adam considers this again, fingers spreading and curling over the coffeepot before something clicks, a strange determination adds to the warm flush beneath his eyes and he takes the seat opposite Nigel in the little booth. The coffee pot goes on the table before him and he turns it so the handle is facing out towards the main diner.

“I need to check the other -”

“They’re fine,” Nigel says, sawing into his steak that falls apart beneath his knife, still scarlet in the center. He grunts a soft sound of approval. “What do you do, Adam?”

“I’m not supposed to sit while I’m -”

“You’re fine,” he says instead this time, dark eyes lifted, seeking the gaze that skirts away from his own. “What do you do? Not here, this is bullshit. Filling coffee all day. What do you do when you’re not here?”

Adam swallows but he isn’t scared. Fear Nigel is used to seeing, he sees it in people he comes across even when he has no contact with them whatsoever. The bloody Depression will do that to a person. No, Adam isn’t scared; he’s considering.

“I study at the junior college,” Adam says at last. “Mathematics and advanced physics. They didn’t offer astronomy, but I will study that once I finish the papers here and earn enough money to get out to another state.”

“Which state?”

“I don’t know,” Adam admits, eyes slipping to Nigel’s a moment before they flick away again. “Any other state.”

It’s goddamn rare that Nigel doesn’t have anything to say about something. It’s rarer still that his speechlessness stems from someone else. Let alone a college kid working in a diner. Let alone _this_ college kid working in _this_ diner, and for a moment it’s Nigel’s anger that takes the place of his words. His lips thin as he chews a cut of steak smeared through egg yolk.

“Why would you want to go and do a damn thing like that?”

Adam sits back a little, shoulders pressing to the seat. “Do what?”

“School. Physics. Leave the state, I mean - that part makes sense,” he shrugs. “I’m out soon myself. But the rest of it?”

“Education?” Adam asks. “You’re asking me why I’m getting an education?”

The table jiggles as Nigel cuts off another chunk of his steak, lips curved around the fork as he sets it between his teeth. “Seems like a waste of time,” he mutters, mouth full.

Adam blinks at him, brows furrowed in the loveliest confusion. For a moment he says nothing, but he doesn’t get up and leave either. Slowly he brings his arms to cross across his middle, almost defensive, as he shuffles in his seat a little.

“What do you do?” he challenges back after a while. “If you’re not getting an education. Education gets you places, it can help you leave the state and get a good job that pays well to give you a comfortable life. Education is…” He stops for a moment, swallowing. “It’s a way out. It’s a logical and safe way out. So what do you do, if you find it such a waste of time?”

Nigel lifts his eyes again, as egg drips from fork to plate.

“I rob banks.”

In the silence that follows, Nigel chases the slick of egg white around his plate with a lump of steak. He corners it against the french fries, and using his knife, scoops egg onto beef. It’s a good balance when it hits his tongue, equal parts egg and meat, and he adds a french fry just to get all the flavors at once.

The kid stares at him, lips parted.

Nigel stares back for a moment, then languidly returns to his breakfast.

Adam closes his mouth again. Nigel knows the thought process. He can all but hear it aloud. The kid’s been taught that robbing is never good. It’s in the paper all the time - the arrests made on people who steal just to get by. That isn't good either. People who work hard to pay for food for their families who have it taken away.

The misgivings are fucking palpable.

“Do you rob for someone?”

Nigel looks up again, surprised once again with the kids response.

“Don't work for nobody.”

“Do you do it to feed your family?”

“Don't have a family,” Nigel replies, drawing a french fry through some yolk and chewing it. He watches Adam think of more questions to ask.

“Why banks?” he asks at last. “If you don't need it -”

“I didn’t say I don’t need it. You’re not paying for this breakfast, are you?”

Nigel grins, but he’s the only one that does. Adam is motionless, aghast. He’s gone goddamn pale, which is a shame, really, considering how lovely he looked when he blushed. Like a shy schoolgirl, rosy-cheeked and curious.

“Why?” Adam asks again.

“Why not? If it’s in the bank, it’s not doing anyone any goddamn good. It’s not getting used. It’s getting hoarded.”

Adam shakes his head and Nigel watches his attention when it darts toward the counter, the kitchen, and the door all in turn.

“But they’re…” Adam stammers, voice lowering when Nigel makes a motion with his hand for him to keep quiet. “People are saving for things. For a house, maybe, for college. Maybe they need a new tiller, maybe -”

“Or maybe it doesn’t fucking matter,” Nigel says softly. “You’re a smart kid, Adam. Do you know what insurance is?”

“Yes, of course,” he says. “I know what insurance is.”

“Did you know that goddamn banks are insured? Say there’s a fire, it all goes up in flames. The government - with whole miserable vaults of money - pay them back for the losses. That includes building, damages, and the money that torched up like tinder. I come in, I take what I need, they get paid back by the feds,” he shrugs. “And I redistribute what I’ve taken as necessary. To little diners, say, in the middle of goddamn nowhere.”

“That’s not how...” Adam swallows the rest of what he was going to say. He shifts in his seat. “You’re a criminal.”

“Notorious,” Nigel agrees, smiling when Adam’s blush returns. “Ruthless and terrible and all that other trash the papers make up about me. Can’t keep up with them half the time.” He takes another few fries to press between his lips as he watches Adam fidget. It’s fascinating that although the boy is clearly worried, clearly concerned for the safety of his meagre till now that he knows what Nigel is, he has yet to get up and make a scene, yet to get up and move.

“I’m like Robin Hood,” Nigel offers, sitting back and drinking the last of the coffee in his cup. “With a gun and a fucking filthy mouth.”

He shoves the cup towards Adam and waits for him to refill it, which Adam does, slowly, and with the same deliberation he had done it the two times before.

“Robin Hood gave to the poor,” Adam reminds him, setting the coffeepot down again.

“I’m giving,” Nigel counters. “You’re hardly well-off, are you?”

“But I’m...” Adam frowns. “I’m working for this money. I’m not asking for it to be given to me. Tips are at the customer’s discretion, I’d never -”

“Never?”

“No,” Adam says, shaking his head.

“Never,” agrees Nigel, shifting to retrieve his wallet. His plate has been cleaned, as much from not having eaten in a day and change as from the fact it was goddamn good. Adam’s eyes dart downward as Nigel slips out a bill.

“For the food,” he says. Another bill settles atop it. “For the coffee.”

“It’s only a dime,” Adam whispers, watching wide-eyed.

“For you,” Nigel says, laying down one more, and raising a brow. “Tell me again that I’m not Robin fucking Hood.”

Adam makes a very small sound and presses his lips together. “That’s a semester’s fees,” he murmurs. “More than a semester’s fees. I can’t take this.”

“Why not?” Nigel asks him, pocketing his wallet again. “I enjoyed the meal, I definitely enjoyed the service. And you went above and beyond your job description, sitting down and talking to me because I asked you. I think that more than warrants a hefty tip.”

“But you stole it,” Adam says, brows furrowed in the sweetest confusion. He’s staring at the money. He wants to take it but...

This isn’t an addict’s eyes that look at the money, there is genuine longing there, something akin to a child being shown a toy they had never thought they could have. It’s so innocent. He’s so innocent. It nearly does Nigel the fuck in. After a moment, Adam reaches to take the tip and carefully fold it in his fingers, slipping his hands beneath the table again.

“When will you leave the state?” he asks. Nigel blinks.

“Fuck, now if I wanted.”

“Don’t,” Adam says, pushing to stand up again. He sets everything on the tray and the coffeepot on top and straightens up, looking down at Nigel again. The man blinks again and tilts his head, a crooked grin turning up the corner of his mouth.

“Would you miss me, love?”

“No,” Adam replies, entirely honest. “I have two more semesters to pay for.”

Nigel’s smile widens. “So you’d miss that part of me, at least.”

He pays it no particular offense. He’s the one that decided here was the place where he’d blow his cover, this the kid he’d blow it to. It’s not much of a cover these days, anyway, so much as skirting out of one county and into another, one step ahead of the law. He could be the next state over by nightfall if he needed. And after enough close calls and borderline brushes, Nigel’s fallen prey to what he knows will eventually be his downfall.

Confidence.

No, cockiness.

If he’s not afraid of the police, what’s he got to be afraid of in a goddamn diner?

“Listen,” Nigel says, beckoning for Adam to lean a little closer. “I’d love not to have to leave tonight, sweetheart. I really would. I’d love to be able to come in the morning and eat fucking pancakes with syrup. That’s hard to do when there’s cops around, but there won’t be if you don’t let them cotton on that I’m here.”

“I should,” Adam says. “I should tell them.”

Nigel doesn’t argue that. It’s entirely reasonable. Instead, he shrugs. “They’d give you a reward, if they caught me. They wouldn’t, though, and then you’d be shit out of luck. Or, I could pay the reward right now and save us both the grief. I’ll get my pancakes, you’ll sit with me again, and maybe we’ll get to know each other a little better.”

Adam straightens up and regards the man before him. A man who has so easily admitted to his crimes. A man who gave Adam money not to bribe him but because he had it, and he could. A man who has a really charming smile that Adam knows makes him blush darker looking at it. He usually blushes around girls, he has never blushed in front of a man before.

“We close at eleven,” Adam says at last.

“Is that when you get off?”

“It’s when we’ll stop serving pancakes,” Adam corrects, smiling despite himself. “So you could come in and have some for dinner if you wanted.”

Nigel crooks a smile and dips his head in thanks, fishing out another cigarette as he stands and stretches. Healing stitches snare tight along his ribs, but he trains it from his expression. Better to convey the idea that he could vanish in an instant - and he could, if needed - than to let on that he’s huddled down while he heals. Better not to let on to the less romantic aspects of being a modern goddamn highwayman.

He offers Adam his hand, and when the kid builds up his confidence enough to give it a curt shake, Nigel tightens his grip. He reels Adam in, busted knuckles stroking rough against his cheek. “Remember what I said. You let them know I’m here, you’re out the money and you’re in for a world of fucking clean-up from the mess I’ll leave behind.”

Adam tenses, but doesn’t draw away. Instead he sighs, a spring-sweet breeze against Nigel’s cheek. Nigel breathes him in, heady as boughs of wild rose and just as sweet, just as lovely. Adam’s eyes hood, then close, and then he nods, once.

“And whenever you want to get the hell out of here,” Nigel adds with a smile, “you let me know. See you later, darling.”

He gives Adam a pat on the cheek and releases him. Ignoring entirely the blindered and deliberate lack of attention he’s paid as he goes, by those seated beside the window, he makes his way out to his car.

Adam doesn’t move until the bells on the door return to quiet again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He’s quick on the uptake. He’s alert without seeming conspicuous. He’s somehow fucking fearless of a man who trod cursing into his diner demanding breakfast and then - for a reason Nigel’s certain he’ll never goddamn discern - told him he robs banks. Maybe Nigel’s just intuitive like that, and he read Adam right. Maybe he’s just an idiot with a suicidal sense of humor._
> 
> _And, Nigel allows as Adam returns, Adam is sweet, though the tug in his groin hardly suits the word._
> 
> _Never hurts to have something pretty to look at._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Adam doesn’t work double shifts unless someone is sick or he really needs the money. He gets tired quickly, of the people and the chatter, even when it’s relatively quiet. He rosters for early mornings or ‘til the late evening, and stays to help clean up.

Today, he finishes his shift at three, and goes upstairs to work on his papers. It helps to live above the diner. It helps to have his father’s friends who still remember him from childhood, and offer to help sometimes. Adam doesn’t take charity, he will work for his room. It helps him develop people skills outside of just walking to his classes, and he appreciates it.

Adam climbs onto the bed and pulls his tips from his pocket, sorting through the assorted change until he gets to the pristine notes the bank robber had left him. Adam runs his fingers over the paper, smooth and sleek. He’s never seen money so clean before. He’s never seen it unmarked before. He has never in his life seen a real hundred dollar note in person, until now, the last one laid atop the others.

_For you._

Adam folds the notes down and slips them into the shoebox under his bed, where he keeps all his tips, to save them.

He thinks of what the man said, how he had touched him, first when Adam didn’t want him to, and again when he didn’t want him to, but differently. The second time Adam’s entire body shivered from the touch, all the way to his toes. The second time, Adam isn’t sure he wanted the man to let go, but then he did, and he was out the door and Adam had to take the plate to the kitchen to be washed.

He told him to come back at eleven. It’s quiet at eleven, only one chef on and one person at counter. He will go down, he thinks, at eight, and see if he can take the last few hours of a shift from Peter. He’s sure the man would let him, he’s notorious for slacking off on the job, and Adam likes the work. Yes, he will go downstairs and make himself comfortable in his routine and wait. And if the man doesn’t come back, then he has a guarantee of one more term at school, at least. And if he does -

If he does, Adam thinks he will order pancakes too.

At four, Adam takes a nap. He dreams of a dark man behind him, who turns to dust when Adam tries to look at him. So long as he keeps his eyes forward, the man remains, unseen but a protective presence at his back. Just as the figure slides an arm around his waist, and sighs smoke against the back of his neck, Adam awakens. He isn't afraid. Nervous, perhaps, but not afraid. The thought of the arm around him spreads warmth through him, all through his chest and stomach, and down between his legs.

At five-thirty, just after he's woken, Adam takes a bath to wash away the stickiness.

From six until seven-thirty, he reads. Korzybski's _Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics_ , recently published and borrowed from a professor who favors him. Adam means to dress at seven, but loses himself and another half-hour in his book.

It's ten past eight when he finally makes his way down the creaking back stairs and into the diner again. Dressed in loose wool trousers, now that the heat of the day has passed, and a collared shirt under a red knit vest, he runs a hand over his hair to try and tamp it down. It doesn't really work.

He apologizes to Peter for making him wait, and Peter answers that he's just glad for the night off. Adam glances towards a rowdy group of boys from the college nearby, but they pay him no mind. They never do, even when in classes he tries to talk to other students about their lessons. He talks until he finally runs out of things to say and then they laugh, but they never say much in return.

Once he volunteered to let them use his dad's old car, when they were talking to each other about going to the drive-in. They told him he should drive it himself if he wants to go, and Adam explained that he doesn't know how. Then they said that he should just ride his bike there instead, and when Adam answered that he wasn't sure that was allowed, they laughed harder.

It's hard to tell when they're laughing because he's said something funny, or they're laughing at him. Whenever Adam commits enough thought to sorting it through, it seems most often to be the latter, and so he assumes it always is.

In truth, for now, they don’t bother Adam. Once in awhile one will call over for another soda, or more fries. When he brings it to the table they do little more than hand back the empty glasses and dirty plates, and Adam takes them away. It suits him well enough.

Time passes and no one else comes to the diner. Adam works through equations in his notebook as he stands behind the counter. Slowly, the group of boys trickles out, one by one meeting their girlfriends and driving away. One by one, Adam writes little calculations on a sheet of notepad paper beneath his working, so he can keep track of the bill.

“Breakfast?”

Adam feels his entire body shiver, hand tensing around his pencil before he relaxes and sets it down parallel to the edge of the page.

“All day or already done?”

Adam’s lips quirk and when he lifts his eyes he makes the effort to meet Nigel’s before he looks away.

“Only pancakes left,” he says. “The rest of the kitchen is lamentably closed for the evening. It is nearing ten o’clock at night.”

He lifts his gaze a little higher - daring - and watches the man’s smile spread thin as a curl of steam from a cup of coffee. He has crooked teeth, but not rotten. His breath smells of cigarettes.

"Good thing I came early then. If I'd waited until eleven, I'd be goddamn starving and the grills would be cold."

"I asked the cook to leave batter," Adam says. "I can make them for you."

"Can you?"

"Sure," answers Adam. When he bites his lip, a nervous tic, the man at the counter grunts. Adam releases his lip from between his teeth. "You can sit in the same booth. Or anywhere, there's no one here, but that one is open too."

"Stands to fucking reason if there's no one else here, doesn't it?"

Adam considers the logic, and ducks his head to mask his uncertain smile. "Yes," he agrees, glancing up again only when the man ambles towards the booth in the rear, his back to the wall. "Do you want coffee again?"

"Is there any?"

"I could make it."

It shouldn't be this easy, but all the things that Adam's father tried to teach him about sinning don't seem to apply now. Adam knows that stealing is wrong. He knows that if this man wanted to rob him, Adam couldn't do anything about it. The most logical thing to do right now would be to leave, or call the police even with the man's threats. It's not at all logical to put on coffee for him.

Does sinning make someone a bad person? Or just a person that does bad things? And what evidence is there for God or Heaven or sin or Hell anyway? Adam never had time to ask his dad those questions.

He asks the man instead.

"If someone commits a crime," Adam asks, as he steps away from the coffee to lock the diner door, "that makes them a criminal."

A match flares, and the man drags hard on his cigarette. The smoke thickens his voice. "I reckon."

"But someone who commits a crime doesn't only commit crimes. You robbed a bank, but you helped me pay for school. You paid off your theft with charity. Does doing good erase the crime, or are you a criminal still?"

"In the eyes of the law, hell yes it does," the man answers, watching Adam now as he returns to find an apron. "How about in your eyes?"

Adam ducks his head again as he thinks about it. In his eyes… he let the man back in, didn’t he? He’s making him coffee and he’s about to make him pancakes, surely in his eyes that makes the man worthy of some sort of redemption? Or at least worthy of being shown thanks for doing a generous deed?

Or perhaps it makes Adam reckless. Either way, he finds it’s entirely too exciting. 

“I think actions define a person,” Adam tells him. “And you’ve done nothing criminal here.”

Adam watches the smoke rise up from the cigarette and swallows, checking the coffee pot again before moving to the kitchen to start on the pancakes. The man doesn’t call him back while Adam is working, and Adam takes the time alone to consider this more. He’s never acted this way before. He’s never been so open with someone before, let alone deliberately seeking their company. He’s never locked himself in the diner with another person, another person who has a criminal history, another person who is a man who has Adam’s stomach doing flips and his skin breaking out in shivers.

He thinks of his dream.

He thinks of the state he was in when he woke from it.

Adam doesn’t need to meet the man’s eyes to feel the weight of his attention. It’s a look that grasps at his clothes, his skin, down along his body and back up again. It’s a look that feels like the second time the man snared him close, and smiled a friendly warning against his ear. Adam almost forgets to flip the first pancake, and when he does it’s a little scorched.

The rest come out unscathed - not at all bad, in fact, fluffy and golden brown. Adam smears a little pat of butter between each, rather than the way he was taught to do it - just one dollop on top. It’s a bit exorbitant. Butter’s not cheap, after all. But the man paid for dozen meals at the time of his first, and Adam can’t imagine anyone minding terribly.

The butter was just going to sit there anyway, wasn't it?

The thought gives him a chill, and the chill gives him another bend of pleasure in his belly.

"I made three for you," Adam says. "But you seem to eat a lot, so I left the grill on if you want more."

The man brings his booted feet to the floor, down off the opposite seat where he'd let them rest. He takes the plate and as he does, their fingers brush against its edge. With a quick squeeze, so swift that Adam's sure it was accidental, the man takes the plate and gives him a smile.

"Thanks, darling."

Adam makes a soft sound and moves away to get the coffee. When he returns, he pours it for the man already halfway through his meal and then decisively sits down opposite him. Adam keeps his hands in his lap, his back straight. He doesn’t know how people sit so casually in the booths with other people, half splayed over them, legs tangled beneath the table. He’s seen couples in here all the time, doing just that. It’s always made him a little uncomfortable, and always tugged that same spot in his belly that the thought tugs now.

He bites his lip again and lets it go.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” he admits. “A lot of people don’t want pancakes at ten at night.”

The man snorts, eyes crinkling in the corners when he smiles. “I thought you’d call the cops,” he answers. “Most people wouldn’t take so kindly to what I told you.”

Adam sighs, no more able to find a rational explanation for it now than he has since steak and eggs that morning. He shakes his head. “You also told me that there would be blood and broken glass if I did.”

“Most likely.”

“I don’t want to have to clean that up,” Adam says. The man looks up from his pancakes, where he mops up a streak of glistening butter, and laughs. He laughs loud, brash. The sound echoes in the otherwise quiet diner and Adam blinks.

“Smart fuckin’ kid,” he finally says, grinning.

“Why do you swear so much?”

This time, the man’s surprised not into laughter, but into a choking cough. He smacks his fist against his chest and clears his throat, squinting from beneath a swath of greying hair that makes him look older than Adam guesses him to be. “That’s what you ask me? Not my goddamn name, not about -”

“There,” Adam says. “You did it again.”

“Raised up hearing it. Nobody’s gonna tell me not to do it. And it feels pretty goddamn good,” the man answers, after a few moments of consideration. “You should try it sometime.”

“I -” Adam blinks at him. He’s never sworn in his life. He was brought up to never do so, and he’s hardly ever had reason. He feels that flush of excitement again, being encouraged to do something naughty just for himself. “Don’t swear.”

“Ever?”

“Not ever.”

“Fuck me,” the man replies, and takes another bite of his pancakes. Adam’s cheeks flush bright at the words. “Can’t remember the last time I didn’t fucking swear, it’s natural as breathing.”

“You’re very strange,” Adam points out gently, smile perking his lips up when the other looks his way. Adam sneaks another glance to the man’s dark eyes and looks away once more. “What’s your name?”

The man snorts softly and shakes his head, murmuring something about how Adam needs prompting for everything. It doesn’t sound malicious - if anything, it sounds playful. He regards Adam as he sits back and brings his fingers to his lips, just tapping there. 

“Nigel,” he says at last, deliberately forgoing a surname Adam could link to news in the paper. “But very few people call me that.”

“What do they call you?”

“Whatever bad word comes to mind first,” Nigel scoffs, smiling behind his hand as Adam blushes. He watches the young man fidget, hands pressed between his thighs the way he’s sitting, squirming to try and find a position that is as comfortable as it is open. He wonders how often this boy talks to people, how often they actually listen to what he has to say.

When Adam says nothing, Nigel returns to his plate, mopping up the last of the butter with his pancake. They’re good. Soft and warm and the fact that they were made for him, especially for him, makes them all the better. Nigel watches Adam lick his lip again, painting it a darker pink than the other, and has to fight to not reach out and touch it.

“Do you want some more?” Adam asks him, watching carefully for a response. When Nigel nods, Adam reaches for his plate and takes it up.

“Have some with me,” Nigel calls after him when Adam moves back to the kitchen. There is a pause, the boy already around the corner by the flat top, before his voice comes back to him.

“Okay, Nigel.”

It shouldn’t be this easy. Stumble into a diner along the road and find a kid who neither stares him down like he’s smeared in shit, nor tries to pretend he isn’t there. A kid who sees Nigel without even needing to look at him, who’s eager to please and just enough of a smart-ass not to be cloying.

Nigel lights a cigarette. In the kitchen, the spatula scrapes against the stove.

And all of those things are nice. Real fuckin’ nice, actually, now that Nigel’s picture showed up in a paper three counties over and he’s on the move for good. But it’s better still that this kid happens to be - to Nigel’s brawl-battered brain, anyway - a goddamn genius.

He’s quick on the uptake. He’s alert without seeming conspicuous. He’s somehow fucking fearless of a man who trod cursing into his diner demanding breakfast and then - for a reason Nigel’s certain he’ll never goddamn discern - told him he robs banks. Maybe Nigel’s just intuitive like that, and he read Adam right. Maybe he’s just an idiot with a suicidal sense of humor.

And, Nigel allows as Adam returns, Adam is sweet, though the tug in his groin hardly suits the word.

Never hurts to have something pretty to look at.

“Let me ask you something,” Nigel says, as Adam sets their plates to the table and eases into the creaking seat. “Why do you work here?”

“My dad worked here.”

“And he’s gone,” Nigel asks.

“Dead. Yes.”

Nigel hums around the filter between his lips. It’s no good apologizing for things you haven’t done. He ashes the cigarette to the tray, freshly emptied but for his own mess, and watches Adam cut his pancakes into small, evenly-sized squares.

“Do you like it?”

“My dad being dead? No.”

“Working at the fucking diner,” Nigel says, eyes wide. “Christ.”

“It’s fine,” Adam admits, taking a piece of his breakfast-for-dinner to quietly chew until he swallows. “I have a room upstairs that was my room before, but I pay for it now. It’s fair to the man who owns the diner. He knew my dad.”

“And he still makes you pay?”

“No,” Adam shrugs. “I choose to pay. It’s not my diner, I can’t live here for free.”

“So you’re paying for a room. School. Everything else, all on your own?”

Adam shrugs and nods. “Yes.”

“How’s that working for you?”

“My dad, he…” Adam stops for a moment, pulling his lips between his teeth. His eyes dart in tiny movements back and forth across his plate. His fingers lift and return one by one to the fork. Nigel draws a breath.

“You don’t have to -”

“He left me an inheritance. It isn’t much, a couple hundred dollars. But I don’t buy anything I don’t need, and I try to wait even on the things I need. That, plus the money here…”

“That goes right back into paying rent. So you’re sinking,” Nigel asks. “Not fast. Most days you don’t even feel it. But sometimes you notice that the water’s a little higher than it was before, and it never goes back down.”

“It’s very dry here,” Adam whispers, brow creased. Nigel shakes his head - is the kid fucking with him or just dense? - and lifts a hand so suddenly that Adam startles a little.

“Money. I’m talking about fucking money, Adam. Debt. Do you understand?”

“I understand debt,” Adam fires back, brows furrowing in a very different sort of emotion. It’s utterly endearing. “I understand how dangerous it is, and I’ve never been in it. I never want to be.”

“On the same page again,” Nigel sighs, nodding. “Paying rent and paying tuition and whatever the fuck you pay for, that puts a strain on finances, yeah?”

“Yes,” Adam says. “But others...”

“Well, I’m asking about you,” Nigel points out, and Adam swallows, ducking his head in a nod.

“Yes, some weeks are harder than others. I do double shifts sometimes.”

“And still have to get to class. You have a car?”

“It was my dad’s,” Adam says. “I don’t know how to drive.”

“How the hell do you get to the college?”

“My bike.”

“So you’re working double-shifts,” Nigel says, ticking off on his fingers. “Going to class. Doing homework for class. Riding your bike back and forth, what, ten miles each way?”

“Do you want more coffee?” Adam asks, but when he moves to stand, Nigel catches his wrist. It’s gentler than the first time, but still firm. This time, Adam doesn’t jerk away from him.

“This is a bullshit fucking way to live,” says Nigel. “Smart kid like you should be able to focus on school. You shouldn’t have to worry about money.”

“We’re in a depression. Everyone worries about money.”

“I don’t.”

Adam’s mouth opens and he closes it again, gently grinding his teeth before he sighs out and shrugs. He doesn’t argue. No, Nigel does not have to worry about money, but he doesn’t worry about school or travel or food or -

It must be very liberating.

Adam takes up his fork again to spear another piece of pancake and deliberately chew it, looking up when Nigel looks at him. His hand is still holding Adam’s wrist down to the table. His hand is rough and very warm, and Adam likes it. He doesn’t want him to let go. He wants to turn his own hand around so he can feel his palm with his fingers.

“No, you don’t,” Adam admits after he swallows.

“I am a lot of things, Adam.” Nigel’s voice, although they’re alone, drops low. “I am a ruthless bastard. I am a robber and a thief and worse. There isn’t a thing in this goddamn world that I’m afraid of, for longer than it takes me to fucking laugh at it. But you know what I’m not?”

Adam’s cheeks heat, and he shakes his head.

“Smart,” he says. Adam blinks, and Nigel laughs. He shrugs up a single shoulder as he leans back and releases Adam’s wrist. “I’m not smart. I never went to school. I mean, maybe when I was little, but I don’t remember it. I can barely fucking read.”

Adam brings his freed hand to his mouth and gently chews against his thumbnail. He can’t imagine not being able to read. He would get so bored.

“There are other ways to be smart,” he suggests. Nigel blinks at him, again surprised by the response, hardly unwelcome but completely unpredictable. The kid is extraordinary, and what’s most interesting, is that he seems to be entirely, genuinely unaware of it. “You could be people-smart. That’s something you can’t learn at school. I tried and I never could.”

Nigel doesn’t argue this, dipping his head in a slight nod. “That, I can do,” he says.

“You can tell when someone’s joking, or when they’re annoyed.”

“I can tell when someone’s gonna start a fight with me at the end of the night before we’ve even had our first beers,” Nigel snorts, grinning. His plate clear, he rests back against his seat, turning the coffee mug in slow circles. “Yeah. I know when someone’s being a shit. When they’re trying to be funny. I know when they want me to take them to bed.”

His eyes narrow, keenly aware of how Adam’s lips part a little at this last.

“But none of that makes a goddamn difference with stuff that isn’t people.”

“Like what?”

“Like knowing whether a bank’s dry or not before I hit it. Like knowing how to open a safe. All I can do now is stub my fucking toe on them when I try to kick them over.”

Adam’s lips twitch in a grin before he can help it and he presses his hand to his mouth to temper the expression. He can’t hide the warm blush against his cheeks, though, and hopes Nigel doesn’t notice it. He knows he does. It makes Adam blush harder.

“You shouldn’t kick a safe,” he says. “It won’t help you get it open.”

“I know that now,” Nigel agrees. “Several fucking sore toes later.”

Adam laughs again, gathering his knees up to his chest as though that will help him hide the sound and the genuine pleasure at being able to laugh with someone who isn’t laughing at him. And Nigel isn’t laughing at him. He’s smiling, and it’s genuine, it reaches his eyes and softens his expression. He looks younger, and less tired.

“Most safes have a set mechanism that you learn to work,” Adam adds. “I’ve never seen one, but I’ve read about them.”

“But you’d have to have the key, yeah? The numbers, I mean.”

Adam considers this, and quickly shakes his head. “Not necessarily. There are ways that you can listen to the tumblers, test and try again, and most people are likely to keep simple combinations.”

“Could you?”

Adam blinks.

“Could you open one?” Nigel asks, clearer this time, curious.

Adam’s eyes widen, bright and huge, watching the man before him. In his seat, Adam’s toes press together and he squirms as though to sit lower in his chair. He’s never considered it. It has never occurred to him that reading about robbing banks could lead to actually robbing them. And that is what he’s doing isn’t it? He’s facilitating the robbing of another bank, some time in the future, in this state or the next.

“I don’t know,” Adam replies honestly. “I’ve never tried.”

Nigel taps a cigarette out of the pack. He offers one to Adam, who shakes his head. It rests loose between his lips, and a quick snap of a lighter flashing silver in his hand gives flame to it.

“Would you?”

Adam’s eyes grow, if possible, wider, and he lets one leg slip to the floor again while he wraps an arm around his other knee.

“Umm.” It’s the least eloquent he has ever been with anyone, even when he was offered this job, even when he was told that he is top of his class at the junior college, he had something to say then. He has nothing at all to say now. What can he say? He feels that strange sensation of nervous laughter build up in his throat again and turns his face against his knee.

“I don’t know,” he says again. And then the laughter catches him unbidden and presses past his lips and against his soft trousers. “I don’t know, and I’ve never wanted to before.”

“Do you now?”

Adam shakes his head and shrugs. “It’s illegal.”

“Very.”

“It’s wrong, and a bad thing to do and...” Adam bites his lip and lifts his eyes to Nigel again. The man is smiling at him around the filter of his cigarette, and Adam doesn’t think he can lie to him. “And really exciting.”

“It’s a fucking blast,” Nigel laughs. Adam’s grin widens until he hides it again, cheek turned against his knee. He’s shy. Strange. Strikingly lovely, blushing like a virgin every time Nigel looks at him for a little too long. Nigel looks at him anyway. He wonders how soft his lips are, bitten pink and licked damp. Nigel curls his fingers around his mug to fight down the urge to reach over and run his thumb across them.

“Do you hurt people?”

Nigel’s smile dims a little. The question lingers between them in the quiet, strange to hear in a place like this. His brow creases, and he sucks a hard drag, sighing smoke.

“You said there would be blood and broken glass,” Adam says. “Do you hurt people?”

“When the only other option is death or prison,” answers Nigel. “When I have to.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone. I haven’t. I won’t.”

Nigel tilts another cordial nod to him, ashing his cigarette. “You wouldn’t have to. I’m good enough at that on my own. You’re not people-smart.”

“No.”

“So I should be blunt,” Nigel asks. Adam’s throat clicks when he swallows. “Come with me.”

“I…” Adam stops breathing a moment, Nigel can see his pulse hammering at his throat, pale and lovely, muscles pulled taut in it as he turns his head. “Why?” he asks. “Where? I have… study here. And a job, and -”

“Because you’re smart,” Nigel tells him again. “And you’re more than this, and because you have nothing here to stay for, you’re making up fucking excuses and you know it.”

Adam swallows again. How can Nigel read him so well? He is the first person to genuinely make an effort to do so and it’s unnerving. The same excitement, the same worry tugs at Adam’s belly. He knows he should say no, politely ask Nigel to leave and close up shop - it’s well past cash out and closing time. He knows he should report him to the police and hope he’s caught in another state so there isn’t glass and blood to clean up. He knows he should be good.

And he really, really doesn’t want to be.

“Where would we go?” Adam asks him, voice very quiet.

“Throw a fucking dart and see where it lands,” Nigel tells him, smiling. “We have the entire country at our wheels, and all the time in the world.”

He should be good. He should tell Nigel to go. He should do the dishes and check the till and sharpen his pencil for the morning shift.

He should. He knows he has to.

Adam squirms in his seat again and chews his lip, again and again, considering, calculating, feeling his heart hammer and pound and bring his blood hotter and hotter beneath his skin.

“Okay,” he says, eyes flicking to Nigel’s. He laughs. “Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Adam grins, laughs, shrugs helpless and out of control of his own body and his own logic and it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying.

And it’s thrilling.

A quiet life lived on the big open plains. A quiet job and a quiet education. A quiet depleting of the money his father left him. And a quiet emptiness inside Adam that now suddenly feels full, saying yes to a man who just asked him to run away. Yes to the man who just asked if he’d crack safes and rob banks.

Yes to the man he met not a day before, whose eyes glitter when he smiles and whose smile makes Adam feel as if the earth itself slipped out from beneath him.

“When?” Adam asks.

Nigel merely raises a brow, smile widening. “Now.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You don’t have to do anything. But if you don’t know how it feels, it’s like…” Nigel takes a breath, the steering wheel’s leather squeaking beneath a tightening of his fingers. “It’s like getting punched in the face. It’s scary as hell before it happens, but once you’ve had it done, you’re not afraid the next time. You’ve done it. You know how it feels.”_
> 
> _“You’ve been punched in the face?”_
> 
> _Nigel gives him a dry look. “Darling, outside the night we had pancakes, I’d be hard fucking pressed to think of a night that I wasn’t.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

“Just to get a taste for it, sweetheart.”

Adam doesn’t know why Nigel calls him that, but it soothes him a little anyway. A little, but not enough to stop him from chewing to pieces the dry skin at the side of his thumb. He pulls his foot up into his seat, and shakes his head.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything. But if you don’t know how it feels, it’s like…” Nigel takes a breath, the steering wheel’s leather squeaking beneath a tightening of his fingers. “It’s like getting punched in the face. It’s scary as hell before it happens, but once you’ve had it done, you’re not afraid the next time. You’ve done it. You know how it feels.”

“You’ve been punched in the face?”

Nigel gives him a dry look. “Darling, outside the night we had pancakes, I’d be hard fucking pressed to think of a night that I wasn’t.”

Before them is an unassuming little building, brown as faded leather and just as tired. A single car sits beside their own, their makeshift home, the backseat stuffed with Nigel’s mess of belongings and Adam’s carefully packed bag. It’s been two weeks since the diner. Two weeks sleeping in motel rooms that Adam doesn’t have time enough to unpack his things into before he’s got to pack them up again.

“So going into the bank, I will be punched in the face?” Adam asks him, voice small, and Nigel snorts beside him.

“You’re so fucking literal, Jesus Christ,” he sighs. “No, darling, you won’t be punched in the face. It was metaphor. A… comparison, if you will. Something that seems so scary until it happens to you and you realize you’re okay - sore, maybe - but not dead. You know?”

Adam slowly nods, processing. He continues to chew his nail, foot up on the seat beside him. He rocks his knee back and forth until Nigel sets a palm against it and his hand warms through the fabric to Adam’s skin.

“Will you come in too?” Adam asks.

“Of course,” answers Nigel, taken aback by the question. It would be an insult, from anyone else. An accusation of being chicken-shit that would earn a shouting-down at best and a swift smack otherwise. But Adam means it when he asks. He’s afraid and uncertain.

Nigel gives his knee a squeeze, and leans a little closer. Their shoulders rest together, comfortable and close. Adam remembers how the grass outside his family’s house - long ago - would go completely still as thunderclouds swelled like waves across the sky. The wind never stops moving out here, but it did then, in the instant before the rain broke and the sky shattered blinding.

“You’re not the front man in this,” Nigel tells him. “I am. That’s on me. Just like we agreed, yeah? When you’re done, you’re done. I’ll bring you back to the diner and that’s that. But I can’t expect you to turn a fucking lock in a safe if you don’t know how the room feels before that. It doesn’t make sense now…”

Adam nods, and Nigel laughs, resting his weight a little heavier.

“It will,” he says. “Trust me, it will. You hang back by the door and keep an eye out. I’ll take care of the rest. Okay?”

Adam licks his lips and nods again. In the days since the diner, he has slowly learned to read Nigel when he speaks. He's stopped trying to use elaborate metaphors, though they still come out once in a while. He speaks pretty well if Adam ignores the profanities in every sentence.

He says what he means, at least. 

And he doesn't lie.

Adam sets both feet to the floor and gives Nigel a semi-convincing smile. He will try. He will do what Nigel says and he will understand how this feels and if he can't do it then he will go back to the diner and back to school and hope Nigel passes through town again.

“Okay,” he sighs. “Let's go.”

Nigel needs no more than that. He’s out the door with a quick slam behind, pistol flashing pearly across its grip where he keeps it tucked beneath his jacket. The whole suit makes him look out of place in the back country, like a yankee. Like a foreigner. Just outside of Ballinger, there’s nobody around here but cotton farmers and sheep herders.

Nigel stands out.

He’s glad for it.

He’s glad for the twice-glanced look he gets when he steps into the bank. He’s glad for the way the small man behind the counter, glasses flashing, stands up uneasily. He’s glad for the stammer when the man speaks.

“What can I do y’for?”

The door clacks shut a second time, as Adam steps just inside. Nigel straightens his shoulders and offers a smile.

“Your money,” he says, simply. Adam - watching the road through the window - makes a muffled sound. “Please,” Nigel adds, for the kid’s sake.

 

The little man adjusts his glasses and furrows his brows. “I’ll uh, I’ll need to see some I.D., young man. No withdrawals without one I’m afraid.”

Behind him, Nigel can hear Adam shift by the door. He makes no other sounds, he doesn’t shuffle or fidget or panic, he just stands there, watching as he’d been asked to. When Nigel tilts his head to the man at the counter, it’s with a sigh bordering on exasperation. When he sets the gun down on the table before him, it’s with a quiet hum.

“Not that kind of withdrawal, I’m afraid,” Nigel tells him. “Your money,” he repeats instead. “All of it. Right now while things are still civil.”

“Red car,” Adam tells him, pushing his hands into his pockets and leaning his shoulder against the door a little more firmly. “And another one behind it.”

“Are they police?” Nigel asks him.

“No.” 

“Then it don’t matter.”

The man laughs, but it’s hardly a happy sound - more like a gentle strangulation. He shakes his head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he starts to say, reaching to adjust his suspenders before Nigel curls a hand around his gun and the man’s movements stop.

“I think you do,” Nigel tells him, not unkindly. “I think you understand exactly what I’m asking, and exactly what you need to do for us to all go on our merry way.”

Pale, the man says nothing, hands on the counter and body still but for the tremors that rattle him. Nigel watches him. He waits, patiently. After enough moments pass, he sighs.

“I don’t want to use this any more than you want me to use this. You don’t want to die -” The man makes a sound, at this, a whimpering and pathetic thing. “And I don’t want you to die. Over other people’s money? That’s bullshit. Why is their paper worth more than your life?”

The man considers this, perhaps just so he doesn’t have to consider the gun being pointed at him by an unfairly charming man, perhaps because it genuinely warrants the thought. Nigel sighs and cocks the thing. From the back of the building, another door opens.

This man is younger than the one behind the counter, and older than Nigel - though not by much. Light hair and dark eyes that widen in surprise at seeing the scene he’s just walked in on.

“Nigel,” Adam’s voice rises a little, but not in panic.

“I see him.”

“Another car just pulled up, just behind yours. Someone’s getting out.”

Nigel groans deeply and lets out a string of sighed profanities before turning the gun to the younger man as he tilts his head back to look at Adam. He waits, but Adam offers more information on the people who may or may not be heading to the bank. One thing he will have to push is that the boy gets better at explaining fucking anything rather than nothing at all.

“And?”

Adam opens his mouth to answer but Nigel’s hardly able to hear it. The young man lunges at him, hands up to push the gun away, his weight and the element of surprise enough to shove Nigel to the ground. He hits it hard, chest smacked empty of air. He can’t draw a breath yet, his lungs up in his throat, but he can move.

His knuckles crack the young man’s nose with a wet smack. A goddamn Biblical deluge of blood forces Nigel to close his eyes, but the slight shift in weight of the startled man atop him is enough that he can drag himself free. Or try to, anyway. Though the man is still snarling pain, he fists Nigel’s jacket in his hands to jerk him back from where he clambered.

“Are they coming?” Nigel shouts, before he’s caught across the jaw by a quick blow. He grips his gun tighter.

“No, I don’t - maybe,” stammers Adam. He wasn’t watching the people outside, he was watching Nigel get beaten by the man sitting atop his chest. Bile wells bitter in Adam’s throat and he looks back out the window again. “No, no, they’re walking somewhere.”

Nigel grins, teeth stained scarlet. He cocks the pistol and before he can get struck again, he crams it beneath the young man’s chin, forcing his head upward. The man stops moving, and shaking, lifts his hands. His nose is broken, still pulsing blood down across his mouth. Nigel spits aside to clear his own.

“One more fucking move and your brains are going to decorate the fucking ceiling.” He glances to the man behind the counter, just in time to see him lower a hand beneath the counter.

Nigel snares the man atop him by the hair and jerks him to the floor, rolling atop to pin him with knees dug hard against his shoulders. He levels his gun at the man behind the register and squints, pulling the shot when he squeezes. The bullet thumps into the wall so close beside the cashier that the next sound they hear when the room clears of ringing is the sound of the man pissing himself.

Nigel doesn’t move. He keeps his hand shoved against the young man’s throat, firm enough to slow his breath, and requiring only the barest increase in pressure to crush his windpipe. The gun remains trained on the man behind the counter, now praying.

“Listen,” Nigel says. The man shudders a sob. “Listen!” he snarls, and the man’s eyes lift. Nigel grins. Beneath him the young man sputters, choking, and Nigel sits as easily astride him as he would an old horse. “On the counter, now. Neat piles. Darling,” he says, “make sure he doesn’t reach for anything he shouldn’t, would you?”

Adam regards them all warily before carefully stepping from the door to do as Nigel asked. He walks nearer the man who now works quickly to put money on the counter, neat piles, as instructed. He's a mess, and Adam doesn't get closer to him than he needs. 

He doesn't look at Nigel pinning the other man to the floor.

He's a mess, too.

When the elder teller is done, Adam steps closer again and gathers the money against his chest.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. “For not pushing any wrong buttons. I didn't want to see anyone die.”

“Just go,” the man mutters, jaw clenched tight. He doesn’t meet Adam’s eyes, he barely looks at him at all. Adam takes in a breath to speak again but the man growls, “Just get out!”

So Adam does. With bundles of bills in his arms, he makes his way towards the door. Nigel watches him go, and slowly unseats himself from the man pinned under him who chokes down air as if he were on the brink of drowning. Standing above him, feet spread wide, Nigel keeps his gun trained on the man behind the counter, although he doesn’t move, frozen by fear and anger and shame.

“I’ll call the cops,” he says to Nigel, voice failing even as he tries to keep it strong. “The moment you’re out that door.”

“You should,” Nigel agrees. “Tell them you were robbed at gunpoint.”

The man stares at him, as Nigel backs against the door.

“Tell them I threatened to kill you. Show them the bullet hole. But remember when you do, who attacked who first, and how quickly I might have ended it all, yeah? Never let it be said I’m not a goddamn gentleman.”

He turns through the door and motions to the car, waving his gun in Adam’s direction. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I can’t -”

“Get in the fucking car!”

Adam stands motionless beside it, shaking his head. “My hands are full.”

There’s a thundercrack and rain, as shotgun pellets spray glass in a glittering downpour around them. Nigel curses, ducking towards the driver’s side of the car as through the busted bank window the teller loads in another pair of shells. He slips inside his seat, and leans over to shove Adam’s door open for him. The kid drops to his seat and Nigel sets a hand against his head, shoving him down out of sight and snaring the door to slam shut. They’re peeling out as the second shot fires, and within moments, they’ve left no more than black rubber streaks in their wake.

Adam doesn't get up from the floor for a long time, curled very little and laying in a nest of crumpled bills. Nigel curses often, glancing in the rear view mirror and turning his head. He only stops when he hears Adam make a sound.

“You alright?”

Adam shakes his head and makes the sound again, a strange little warble before it breaks, like a wave against the shore, into a giggle. Nigel blinks.

“Are you laughing?” He asks, his own lips twitching a little. “Are you fucking laughing, Adam?”

Adam shakes his head again as his laughter grows louder, damn near lyrical with how beautiful it is. He bites his lip and looks up at Nigel from where he lays.

“We just robbed a bank,” he tells him quietly, before breaking into laughter again.

Nigel watches him a moment more, his own smile spreading despite his annoyance at how messy it got, despite the busted lip and swelling jaw. He rubs the back of his hand across his bottom lip. A streak of scarlet remains on his skin.

“Goddamn right we did,” he agrees, as Adam presses his hands to his face and laughs even more. Poor kid’s delirious, overwhelmed by the same adrenaline that makes Nigel feel now like his heart’s going to splinter his ribs and his skin’s going to give way to the hot torrents of blood beneath. It tastes like metal on his tongue. It tastes like blood and gunpowder.

Nigel waits until he hears the laughter jerk out of time with a hitched sob, and then he settles his hand to Adam’s hair.

“You did good,” he tells him. “Damn fucking good for your first time. No one died. Couple bangs and bruises. Lot of fucking cash, sweetheart. You did good.”

Adam just shakes his head again and lies still while Nigel touches him. When he makes to move his hand away, Adam catches it to press to his face and hold it there instead. Nigel doesn't try to move it away again.

Usually news travels pretty damn fast when a bank gets robbed, but the police act slowly. They take their time on the scene, finding clues, taking statements. By the time they're finished with the necessary paperwork, Nigel can be on the other side of the state, and in a new car.

He worries only because once in a while a rogue will seek out on his own.

None have, here. Perhaps they can't spare the men. It’s only a matter of time, he wagers, enough banks hit creating a panic that moves them faster. He lets the thought pass, for now.

Nigel strokes against Adam's face and tries to free his hand again, only to hear a discontent hum from the young boy.

“I gotta change gears, kid.”

Reluctantly, Adam relents the hand needed.

Nigel shifts to a lower gear, miles and miles already between them and the bank. With his hand free, he finds a cigarette, one whole among the rest of the packet, crushed when he was taken to the ground. He lights it and trades it to his other hand, resting on the wheel.

Adam watches, wide blue eyes shining damp, and cheeks ruddy.

Nigel smiles a little, and Adam mirrors it.

“You don’t have to stay on the floor, darling.”

“I know.”

With a nod, Nigel accepts this choice, and takes a drag. He rests his hand not on Adam directly, but on the seat where he rests his cheek in folded arms. After a moment, he moves it a little closer. Again, when another few minutes pass. Near enough to touch, but Nigel waits.

Small talk is bullshit, he knows, but what’s he going to do? Make a grand speech? Get philo-fucking-sophical about his excuse that this is all just redistribution of wealth? He feels like he should say something, though. “Do you want to count the money?” Nigel offers. “Once we’re on the road for a few hours, we’ll find somewhere to sleep.”

Adam nods. “I can do that,” he says. He remains comfortably curled on the floor, watching Nigel smoke, ashing the cigarette out the window. His face will swell a bit, bruises building on his jaw and around the cut on his lip. Adam thinks back to watching the fight, unexpected and bright and faster than he had ever imagined a fight could be.

He finds he is relieved not only that Nigel didn't kill anyone, but that he didn't suffer more injuries. It tugs at Adam already that Nigel is hurt. He will offer to help him clean up, he thinks. Find ice. Get water.

“I feel so tired,” Adam mumbles after a while.

“It's the adrenaline leaving you,” Nigel explains around his cigarette. “You'll feel like you could sleep a fucking week, the first time.”

“And the second?”

Nigel sucks his teeth in thought, then grins. “That’s when you start asking when the third will happen. But this time, you’ll get tired. It’s a strange tired, like you’re drunk but can’t fall asleep. You’ll want to. You’ll try. But don’t be surprised when it’s hard to make happen.”

Adam considers this a moment, processes, and hums a neutral note in acknowledgement. He starts to gather the money, spilled all over, and keeping it pinned on the seat with one hand, begins to put them in order by size. Some of the bills are flat and new, others are wrinkled and faded. These ones, Adam tries to smooth flat like the rest. They were wrinkled in people’s pockets, in their wallets. Kept at the bank and saved, maybe for something important.

Maybe for a house, or for a car. Maybe for someone to go to school like Adam does.

Like Adam did.

He frowns at how the wrinkled ones upset the order of the rest, creating a discord that he can’t seem to press away with his palms. With a sigh, he counts through them anyway, adding quickly. “Eight-hundred forty,” he finally says. Nigel whistles.

“Not bad for a little pisshole bank,” he laughs. “Take half of it.”

“Half?” Adam asks, wide-eyed. 

“You earned it.”

“I just… stood by the door,” Adam mumbles, letting his hands run over the bills again.

“I wouldn't have managed to keep ‘em both down and take the money alone,” Nigel points out. “So half is yours.”

Adam tries to argue again but changes his mind. It isn't worth the argument. It’s almost as much as he would make in a year, his cut alone. He can save the money and add it to his other savings, to have enough that when Nigel gets bored of robbing, they can find a place to live and Adam can go to school again.

Harvard maybe. Or MIT. Schools he has never thought about but in his most sleepy fantasies and hopes.

“What will you do with your money?” Adam asks him.

Now there’s a fucking question. He’s got enough stashed to live modestly and comfortably for longer than he deserves. He doesn’t, in a sense, _need_ more. But he wants it. And he wants the thrill of getting it. And he wants to feel the heightened pulse hammering through his body until it eventually kills him, and Nigel knows it will.

“Fuck if I know,” Nigel snorts. “Play cards. Drink. Get a thick steak somewhere. Get a thick woman, if I can find one.”

“Oh,” Adam replies, brows furrowing a little. He doesn't say any more. He starts to split the money evenly, keeping them in tidy piles as he turns to sit in the seat instead.

He hadn't considered not saving it. He hadn't considered throwing his money away, spending it on anything. He should, he needs new clothes and shoes, more books.

“Maybe I’ll find one too,” Adam says after a moment, though the thought pulls a tug of displeasure in his gut thinking that Nigel will find someone to sleep with. 

Nigel’s brow lifts, and he glances sidelong at the kid beside him. Along the empty stretch of road, hardly paved, spread great unending plains of high summer grain and stocky green cotton. The sky above spans from pale blue horizon to indigo above, spotted through with bits of cloud like stray sheep lost from a flock. Adam watches out the window, as Nigel watches him.

“Would you?”

In his reflection in the glass, Adam’s brow creases. “Would I find one?”

“If you found one, would you fuck her?”

There’s a shift, tense, coiling like barbed wire plucked vibrating down its unwelcoming line. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who - I mean, if she would want -”

“That’s why you fucking pay them,” Nigel laughs. “Then it doesn’t matter what they want.”

The joke - such as it is - falls flat. Adam says nothing, nor does he fidget again. He’s so tense, so motionless that not even the car’s constant jostling sways him. Nigel reaches to touch his leg, to at least spur him to breathing again. Adam startles at the contact hard enough that Nigel jerks his fingers back as if scalded.

“I was kidding,” Nigel sighs. “It was a fucking joke.”

“So you don’t pay women for sex?”

“I didn’t fucking say that.”

“So where was the joke?”

“One fucking bank robbery and you’ve got balls the size of the fucking moon,” snarls Nigel, throwing on the breaks and skidding the car to a stop in the middle of the road. He stares at Adam, who doesn’t yet turn to face him. “So that’s it then?”

“Nigel, drive, please…”

“No. I was just -”

“Joking,” Adam asks, brow raising.

“I was just trying to talk to you. Fucking, man to man, you know? I didn’t expect you to go from bank robber to fucking Baptist in the span of a hundred goddamn miles.”

“I’m not baptised,” Adam tells him, brows furrowing deeper when this seems to upset Nigel more. “I only… why do you need to pay women to sleep with you?”

“You’re fucking serious.”

“I just -”

“They’re whores, Adam, it’s what they do.”

“Yes, but -”

“Think of it as the circle of fucking life, yeah? I get the money from the government that fucks with these women’s lives already, and give that money right the fuck back to them.”

“I just mean that I thought women would want to sleep with you without the money,” Adam finally interrupts, voice louder than Nigel’s yet heard it.

In that moment, filled with no sound but their engine’s cooling click, Nigel’s certain that he’s never been paid a compliment so kind.

What a sad state of affairs that is.

He snorts.

“They do,” he answers, more insistent than he means to sound. “The married ones especially. They love to let their husbands know, too, while I’m still sleeping it all off. Send him right up to the room and let me tell you, a smack to the jaw’s a rude fucking way to wake up from a bender, Adam.”

Adam blinks.

“So why bother? Either they get attached and they’re pissed - or they cry - when I leave the next day, or they’re setting me to have to knock some sense into their spouse. Why bother?” He leans back, with no mind at all for the fact they’re parked in the middle of the road. “Keep it fucking transactional. They get money, I don’t get a headache out of it, and it’s done.”

Adam says nothing for a long time. Then he just nods. What can he say? It's strange to him. People have always been strange to him. He thinks of his own empty threat and how Nigel had known it immediately to be. He won't get a woman, he doesn't even think he would want someone who wanted him.

No one has before.

“Can you drive again, please?” Adam asks after a while. “We’re in the middle of the road.”

“And no one else is here.”

“They could be,” Adam points out. “Let's just… can we find a place to sleep?”

Nigel watches the kid a moment more. Exhaustion has darkened circles beneath his eyes, visible clearly now that the flare of annoyance has been snuffed. Nigel sighs hard and reaches out to grasp Adam’s curls. The kid squirms, but doesn’t pull away. It’s more like a shiver, arching up a little from his seat.

“Hey,” Nigel says, with a gentle tug and a little shake. “Alright?”

Adam doesn’t know if he is. He doesn’t even know how to answer that question. It’s barely a question anyway - more like grunts shaped into English-sounding words. But it’s good Nigel didn’t ask him anything more, because his head is buzzing. Goosebumps spill like a sudden summer shower, cool and welcome, from where Nigel holds his russet curls in a loose fist. When he finally nods, the tug feels a little tighter, and Adam sighs.

“Yes,” he says. “Alright.”

Nigel lets him go, and starts the car again. They drive until it’s nearly sunset, and take the first road that points them to a motel. Nigel curses at the price of it, displayed large outside. Fifty-cents a night is five times more than it what it should be out in the middle of goddamn nowhere, which he grudgingly takes to mean that there isn’t anywhere else out here to stay. It’s not a bad-looking place, the roof’s intact and and the lights seem to work. There’s a smaller print beneath the cost on the daylight-bright sign that blinks its letters one after the next - _breakfast included_.

It takes the sting out, a little.

“Put both our cuts into your bag,” he says as they park, close to the rooms. “I’ll take mine once we get inside.”

He snatches up two bags from the back, beneath the unfolded pile of suit jackets and shirts that seems to explode across the back seat every time they load up the car again. These are stuffed back into the leather luggage, and his gun - still wedged at his side - is shoved between. Nigel walks ahead of Adam, still conscientiously packing their money away, and when Adam catches up, Nigel’s arranging for two rooms from the large-haired lady behind the counter in the office.

Adam is damn near swaying at this point. Tired and hungry, his stomach still filled with that turmoil of emotion he can't explain or understand. He takes the key when it's given to him and follows numbly along to their rooms.

Well out of sight of reception, Nigel follows Adam into his.

“I suppose the only fucking advantage of being nowhere is that people have no other choice but to pay your goddamn crazy prices.”

Adam sits heavily on the bed and watches him. Nigel doesn't touch Adam's bags without his permission - he hasn't the entire time they’ve traveled together - but he does watch him to see if Adam will take the hint and open the bag on his own.

“Tomorrow we'll head out of state,” Nigel says. “Somewhere it isn't so bloody hot.”

“Where are we now?”

“West.”

“Everything is hot going west,” Adam points out.

“We need a goddamn map,” Nigel sighs.

When Adam instead of opening his bag sits on the edge of the bed to remove his shoes, Nigel drops into the single armchair in the corner of the room. It’s sparse. They all are. A bed and a radio, a bathroom with a shower. A chair. A light. Stainproof red carpet worn flat, sheets that were once white now used and washed into a pale cream. One window, overlooking the parking lot and the great grand goddamn nothing beyond.

“So maybe we should go east, then,” Nigel says, when Adam sets his scuffed shoes by the end of the bed, and begins unpacking his clothes into the drawers of the single dresser. “What are you doing?”

“Settling in.”

“Why?”

“Because I always do,” Adam points out. “I can't live out of a bag, I need my clothes to be in drawers where they belong.”

“We're leaving in the morning,” Nigel reminds him, taking the money Adam hands him as he passes him again to set more things away.

“Yes,” Adam agrees. “And until the morning we live here, and I want to make myself comfortable.”

“By folding your fucking clothes?”

“Yours no longer fit into your bag because you don't fold them,” Adam says, and with a shrug makes to move past Nigel again.

“What’s the point?”

Adam stops, a small stack of books held against his chest. “So they fit in your bag.” He sets the books down beside the radio, evening their spines so they’re flush with the edge of the dresser. “And since I think you’re asking two questions, in the form of one, the point is to feel for a little while as if we’re not leaving tomorrow morning.”

“You’re hardly even standing. Can’t it wait?”

“No,” Adam says. “Because I’ll need to shower, and change into pajamas before I lay down. And if I lay down now I’ll fall asleep, and wake up in my clothes.”

Nigel reaches for his cigarettes, then remembers they’re crushed to torn paper and dried tobacco. “And that’s bad,” he asks. “Taking a shower in the morning, maybe, putting on clothes then…”

Adam blinks at him as though Nigel’s grown a second head. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not? Shower’ll be there in the morning.”

“Yes, but I don’t shower in the morning. I never have. I shower in the evening and I put on my pajamas and I get into bed and it takes me somewhere between seven and eleven minutes to fall asleep, depending on how tired I am.”

Nigel stares at him, dumbfounded, and when after a moment he can’t manage anything to say, Adam continues his unpacking. He pauses with his empty bag, uncertain of the right place to put it. He tries beside the shelf, but picks it up again. He tries the foot of the bed beside his shoes, and that’s seemingly no good either. Finally he walks to Nigel, and asks him politely to move his legs.

He does, and Adam crouches to slide the bag beneath the chair, where it remains.

When he stands again, it’s with a hand against the arm to steady himself. He lifts his eyes first, through his mop of windswept curls. The sun, brightest on Adam’s side of the car when they drove today, has darkened his freckles along the bridge of his nose and beneath his eyes. He licks his lips apart and Nigel reaches a hand towards him. Rough knuckles scrape soft skin, and dirty fingers tuck a curl of hair behind Adam’s ear.

His lips part a little more, and Nigel pushes gently past him to stand.

“I need cigarettes,” he says, rubbing his hand along his busted lip. His face is swelling, jaw stiffening. He’s not thinking clearly. “Whisky. Did you see if they had ice down there?”

“I -”

“Kitchen might,” Nigel answers quickly. “You should eat,” he adds, as he walks towards the door.

Adam watches him go and doesn’t stop him. He is hungry, his stomach protests when he touches it, and he should seek something out. If not the kitchen then the reception where the lady with the large hair still sits. He could buy something to eat - he has the money now. The fact that he does sends another shiver through him and Adam bends to his bag to get a few bills out from the careful pile he had made.

Small bills, nothing that would be suspicious. The crumpled ones, so he can get rid of those the fastest.

He can eat, he thinks, then go and take a shower, put on his pajamas and sleep. He thinks, though, that this time he will fall asleep between one minute and three; his body has had far too much excitement thrown upon it for one day, and his very first robbery is only part of it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He wants to tell Nigel he’s an impatient shit._
> 
> _He’s been wanting to tell Nigel a lot of things._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

“Come on.”

“I’m trying.”

“Come _on_ , sweetheart!”

Adam grits his teeth and sits back in an awkward sprawl against the cold concrete floor. The safe before him is still infuriatingly sealed, and Nigel’s demands that grow increasingly louder and more petulant aren’t helping.

He should have had an extra coffee this morning. 

Adam rubs his eyes and sighs, sitting forward and pressing his ear to the safe once more, ignoring a low growl that comes as his reply to his silence. Nigel is an active man, very good at planning a job and executing it, very charming and playful and handsome. He’s everything to make his scowling face on the front of the paper well worth cutting out and keeping, but hell if the man knows what patience means.

Adam takes small satisfaction in letting himself think a curse.

He closes his eyes, as Nigel turns his attention back to the four people kneeling on the floor, hands behind their heads. Two women, two men. One of each a patron here at the wrong time, one of each a teller. Amidst Nigel’s softly snarled promises, Adam listens for the mechanisms within the safe.

He’s got the first two numbers down, well-worn tumblers clacking lower than the misses when he landed on 1 and then paired it to 3 shortly after. One more number to go. He thinks. He hopes. Five more numbers to check after this. He thinks. He hopes.

He twists it around to reset it when the fourth number fails, clicking through 1 and 3 again and turning slowly towards 5.

“Any goddamn day now, darling. These fine people want to go home before the fucking Rapture.”

Adam makes a sound but doesn’t otherwise respond. He keeps trying, keeps listening, and eventually another number will fall into place.

“Almost got it,” he calls back, as another growl and loud curse is given in reply. He wishes he could grab Nigel by the face and shake him, remind him that they are here with a job to do and jobs need to be done right, doesn’t matter what they are. Even if they are robbing a third bank in as many weeks as they travel cross-country.

He wants to tell Nigel he’s an impatient shit.

He’s been wanting to tell Nigel a lot of things, and practicing quietly at night alone in his hotel room to get just the right pronunciation of the fricatives in certain words. When another number clicks, Adam barely notices, but when he does, he makes a sound of delighted surprise.

“I think I got it,” he says.

“You fucking what?”

“I think I got it!” Adam says, louder.

“Open it the fuck up!” Nigel whoops, laughing.

Adam grabs the handle, and pulls. The safe jerks forward. The door stays closed.

He pulls again.

Nothing.

It’s the first time Adam curses in his life. A low, hissed _shit_ in the direction of the safe, the new model that offers four-digit protection instead of three. Of course. Of course it is.

“What’s -”

“One more,” Adam answers, biting off Nigel’s question before he can finish it. Nigel calls the tellers suicidal, and returns to berating them for not just giving them the code. He asks them if they really want to die that badly, and it does little good beyond making the woman incoherent.

Adam shakes it off. Head to cold steel, ear pressed close. 1 and then 3 and then 7, and with all those in, he starts at the beginning again. 1-3-7-1. Nothing. 1-3-7-2. Nothing. 1-3-7-3.

“We’ve got to fucking go, angel. Ten fucking minutes ago we needed to go.”

Counting upwards, wiping the combination between, Adam mutters for Nigel to screw off.

“Last chance,” Nigel tells the woman crying. He pulls back the hammer on his gun as she wails.

No. No it isn’t the hammer that clicks - it’s the tumbler, and Adam doesn’t announce anything this time. He draws a deep breath. He would pray, if he believed in that sort of thing. He pulls the door with such force that he nearly hits himself in the face with it, falling back with a laugh.

Inside are neat rows of notes, carefully arranged by their numerical value. Piles and piles of them, much more than the other banks have yet yielded. Adam sighs, allowing himself just a moment of regarding the beautiful organization before he takes the sack at his side and begins to fill it.

“I swear to fucking god, darling, if you’re not fucking done -”

“I’m done,” Adam tells him, standing from behind the counter, face flushed with pleasure and sack over his shoulder, held with both hands.

Nigel blinks at him, as if he’d spoken in tongues. “You -”

“I did it,” Adam grins. He laughs as Nigel’s eyes widen, stumbling in his rush to where Nigel stands in the center of the room. “I did it! I actually did it! Ni-”

He gasps, snared around the waist and dragged almost off his feet. He catches himself against Nigel’s chest but the hard lips held against his own drop the floor out from beneath him. His knees weaken. His breath stops. His eyes widen, and then close, and he pushes his lips back against Nigel’s own just as he draws away.

No names. Rule number one.

“Ladies. Gentlemen,” Nigel says to the assembled, gun trained on them still and arm still wrapped tight around Adam’s waist as he backs towards the door. “Have a goddamn wonderful afternoon.”

Adam keeps a stern hold on the sack as they go. It would hardly do to let go of the thing they had come here to get, and spent too long getting because Adam didn’t consider extra precautions taken in a larger city as opposed to the smaller ones they’ve hit thus far. They make it outside and into the car and the predictable laughter begins again.

Adam is used to that, now, too - the adrenaline that seeps from him in cool waves and makes him shiver endlessly until they find a place to stop and he can have a drink. Always it’s about how well they did, that they had gotten away with it, how they will do it again.

“You kissed me,” Adam giggles, drawing his legs up tight against his chest as the car pulls away from the curb and the motion swings him into the door. “You kissed me!”

“You almost said my name,” answers Nigel, swerving into the road as he tries to fumble a cigarette between his lips. His lighter snaps, a tremor of excitement making him unsteady. “You also opened the fucking safe,” he adds with a grin, cursing as he loses the cigarette somewhere on the floor.

Adam laughs, wild with delight, as the car jerks from side to side while Nigel tries to find the cigarette again. Eyes barely on the road, barely above the wheel, Nigel still hazards a glance to the kid snorting against the back of his hand in the seat beside. He’s a wonder, this one. Still unpracticed, still anxious to the point of being damn near comatose whenever they begin, but capable despite that.

In spite of that.

That’s what fucking matters.

Nigel hits the breaks and the car skids a little sideways. Hurried, he gets another cigarette, lighting it quickly, and revs the car again to start, eyes down either side of the road. “I know you don’t like being touched, but I had to shut -”

“It felt nice,” Adam tells him, and his entire body unfurls with a sigh, chest rising and falling as he catches his breath. One leg caught against the edge of the seat, his knee pressed to the window, the other leg stretches out in front of him. He brings his thumb to his lips again and absently chews against the tortured skin there. “It felt really nice,” Adam whispers again, turning to look out the window and trying to hide his blush as he does.

Nigel stares at him a moment more, coiled up sweet and shy, a grin still drawing up his eyes and lifting the freckles beneath. He stares at him and takes a breath, and with it returns his senses and the recollection that in the immediate past - the extremely immediate past - they just robbed a bank. He revs the motor and guns it.

“The safe,” he says through his teeth, cigarette held firm in his mouth and hands on the wheel. “The safe felt nice?”

“The safe can’t feel nice or not nice,” Adam points out. “It’s a box made of metal with something hidden inside. It was nice knowing I could crack it, it was interesting trying, even though you wouldn’t stop talking and distracting me.”

Adam slips his other leg to the floor as well and squirms a little lower in his seat, enough that the sun doesn’t strike him in the eyes as they drive on.

“It was nice telling you I had finally cracked it,” Adam adds, turning to rest his cheek against his shoulder. “Because you kissed me then.”

Nigel takes a drag instead of shaking his head - he knows it’ll be read wrong. To be frank, he couldn’t give a shit about someone calling him a faggot any more than he could about someone calling him a thief, or violent, or anything else that in some way or another is true. To be even more fucking frank than that, Nigel’s never drawn lines when it comes to a warm hole to stick his dick in.

The thought feels crude, suddenly, when it’s applied to Adam.

He’s known the kid’s fixated on him. From the moment he tripped on practiced words and blushed like he was sunburnt, Nigel’s known. It complicates an already tricky knot that they have to navigate, now that Nigel’s drawing is in the papers.

But for the life of him, Nigel can’t make himself care.

“No names, Adam. Fucking ever.”

“I know.”

“Even though you did good.”

Adam grins, biting his thumb again. “Will you do it again?”

“Fucking what?”

“Kiss me,” Adam says. “If I open another one.”

As the car blazes outside city limits and they leave dust behind them, Nigel laughs, helpless. “I’d do it again right fucking now, darling, for getting that fucker open.”

“You’d need to stop the car.”

“Why?”

“Because it wouldn’t be safe if you didn’t stop the car,” Adam points out, shifting to sit on his hip in the seat, facing Nigel as he drives. “And we need to stay safe so we can find a place to stay, and find a new bank to rob and crack another safe.”

Nigel snorts but he doesn’t disagree, carefully taking his cigarette from his lips to ash it out the window before putting it back again. Adam hums and moves to sit closer to him, pressing a kiss to his cheek, lingering and hot.

“You need to shave,” he tells him. “You’ll have a beard soon.”

His breath cools the remains of his kiss when he whispers, and Nigel shivers. He sits up a little straighter in his seat, lifting his chin and widening his shoulders. Adam starts to settle back to his seat, but Nigel snares an arm around the back of his neck and keeps him close, jerking the car sideways.

It bounces across dry dust and wind-beaten grass, rattling towards a copse of mesquite. Nestled in their shadow, Nigel stops, and puts out his cigarette against the side of the car before flicking it away. He shuts off the car, and without letting go of Adam, turns sideways in his seat.

“You fucking want this,” he accuses him, eyes narrowed. Adam’s cheeks scald scarlet, and his lashes fall long over bright blue eyes as his gaze hoods. Nigel presses their brows together. He teases, lips scarcely touching, soft as newly grown cotton. Again, and again, each time drawing back just enough to avoid Adam’s seeking.

Nigel’s grin curves wide. “Tell me,” he snarls. “Tell me you fucking want this.”

“You know I do, you’re teasing me,” Adam whines quietly, hands set to Nigel’s thighs, holding on so he doesn’t overbalance and fall onto him entirely. He sighs when Nigel’s smile widens and any attempt to kiss him is avoided. “I want it,” he admits finally, flushing darker. When Nigel raises a brow, Adam huffs, displeased, but acquiesces. “I fucking want it.”

His curses sound poorly formed, not the easy ejection that Nigel so often manages, but as though he were someone learning a new language. It makes him sound younger, smaller, more awkward than he already is and it is infuriating to Adam. He should say more bad words, he should get used to them until they flow in his mind as equations and theorems do.

“Nigel,” he whines again.

“Shut up, sweetheart.”

Their mouths meet firm. Nigel grasps Adam by his hair as sleek fingers find his cheeks. He tilts his head aside and smearing their kiss deeper, twists harder against him. Beneath the force of his kiss, he parts Adam’s lips with his own. His tongue traces past teeth and touches, only touches, Adam’s own.

The hands against his face press harder, fingernails curving into his skin. Nigel bears him back, nearly battering his bits against the gear shift in his fervor to pin Adam’s back against the door. He tugs his curls to stop him, parting their spit-slick mouths enough to fill their lungs before - with a low, rumbling groan - Nigel kisses him again.

Adam is fairly sure he has never seen kisses like this before. He has seen girls and boys pressing their lips together in the diner, in the cars outside - making a show of it as the girls sat on the hoods of the cars and the boys pushed up to kiss them that way. He has seen it and envied it, wondering if any girl would ever let him kiss her like that.

He had never expected that someone would kiss him like this.

It’s brutal and bright, leaving his lips tingling every time they part to breathe. Nigel’s stubble rubs against Adam’s lips and cheek and leaves the most pleasant tingling there too. His hands are small and hardly effective in moving Nigel off of him, but Adam hardly wants to. He just rests them there, curls them against Nigel’s firm chest, much larger than Adam’s own.

When they break to kiss for real, gathering breath in their lungs and pushing it out against the other’s skin, Adam laughs again.

“I’m dizzy,” he admits.

“I don’t want to stop,” Nigel says, a laugh heavy in his sigh. “Fuck, Adam.”

Full, flushed lips press hot against his cheek, drifting over scraping stubble that’s greying prematurely. Nigel sighs, loosening and tightening his fingers again and again to feel Adam’s silky curls coil around them. He turns his mouth to Adam’s but instead of rough, savage kisses laid on him, he lets Adam kiss him instead.

When Adam presses upward from where he’s pinned awkward to the door, Nigel moves. He sighs with every kiss that traces his jaw; grunts low with every kiss that comes near his lips. Those that find his mouth are met and returned, mouths bent warmly together, held briefly and parted again. They’re clumsy little things, quick and curious. Every one of them jerks his heart faster.

Nigel only realizes how far he’s moved when he feels Adam’s weight against his chest, and door handle jamming a bruise into his back. He lets go of his grip in the kid’s hair and instead strokes it from his face, seeking between sky-full eyes that finally meet his own.

Adam blinks at him. Nigel blinks back.

“This is a bad idea,” Adam murmurs after a moment, and Nigel feels his stomach fill with cold acid and his heart beat too fucking fast. Adam bites his lip and sits back. “A car isn’t comfortable, and the adrenaline will leave us both soon and we’ll be aching for sleep.”

Nigel’s brows rise a bit and he sniffs, trying to find words again when Adam continues.

“We have the money for a good hotel this time, not a bad one with bugs and stains on the sheets. We should get a good room, just for a night. We can afford it, and you always tell me I have to learn to use my money better. I can only learn from you, and I don’t want to buy women.”

“Neither do I right now,” Nigel says with a laugh that quickly tilts to a groan. He runs his hand down his face, remaining bent the way Adam held him for a moment more. He curses against his palm, smearing the swear away and pulling himself upward.

“Dallas,” he decides, and starts the car again to waddle it out of the ditch into which he drove it. “Another couple hours. We ditch the car, find a room.”

“A nice room.”

“A nice room,” Nigel agrees.

He tries to ignore the pain in his groin, cock throbbing hard inside his trousers. He arranges his arm so it’s hidden from Adam’s view. After a while, it wilts again, and Nigel’s goddamn grateful for the reprieve.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Have you ever even kissed anyone?”_
> 
> _To this, Adam nods, wide-eyed and earnest. “Yes,” he says. Nigel starts to sigh relief just as Adam adds, “You. I kissed you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Dallas greets them with too much heat and too much traffic, but even so neither seem perturbed. Adam sits folded in his seat, chewing his nail and trying in vain to hide a smile that won’t go away. His lips are still pink, smeared so by Nigel’s, and Nigel is fairly sure Adam has no idea.

They pull into a diner, right around the back where there are lots of cars and few people, and take their things from the back seat.

“Lunch?”

“I’m...” Adam considers, smiling. “I think I’m alright. I’ll be starving for dinner.”

“Suit yourself.” Nigel gives him a grin and walks into the diner alone, buying nothing more than a coffee and a greasy hotdog before walking back out. “Let’s go.”

They leave the car. It won’t be found until several days later, when someone notices that it hasn’t been moved for a few days. It’s a good place to leave it, and they hardly have far to go.

Adam takes Nigel’s bags for him, while he eats. Nigel takes them back, and Adam’s too, when he’s done. The city seems so much taller than the tiny little towns they hit along the way, or the great flat plains before that. Adam nearly trips over his feet, eyes up towards the high buildings, darting to the pulse of flashy cars beside them. He doesn’t say he’s never been to the city before. He doesn’t have to. Nigel can see it in his eyes, wide with wonder, and in the little smile that flickers brighter and brighter in the corner of his lips.

There is an immediate difference, it seems, between the words ‘motel’ and ‘hotel’. The dingy little roadside lodgings at which they stayed before now pale in light of the grand building before them. There are rugs, clean and plush, over tile floors within. There are electric lights in the form of chandeliers, far, far overhead. There is a restaurant within, and a bar, and men in suits and women in heels.

A man at the door offers to take their bags. They both decline. Dust-thick and road-weary, they approach a pretty girl behind the counter.

Her cadence is an uptempo version of the ubiquitous southern drawl. Chipper and bright, she makes arrangements for two nights, two rooms, and Nigel ignores the little note of dismay from Adam behind him. They pay in cash, crisp clean notes, and receive no more than a smile and their keys in return. If she’s got any suspicion about them, vagabonds that they are, she doesn’t let onto it. Nigel gives her a wink as he turns away, and when he hears her try to quiet a giggle, he knows they’re fine.

The rooms themselves are on the top floor, far away from the noise of the city below, and at the corner of the building, nearest the stairs. Adam follows Nigel into his room first, and finds it as lavish as the downstairs lobby had been. It is, in fact, two rooms and not one.

One is almost a reception room, with two winged chairs and a table between them. They face a large window currently draped in gossamer curtains and framed by heavy velvet drapes. To the left, a door leads to the bedroom, and through there, to the bathroom beyond.

Adam swallows, his bottom lip slipping between his teeth a moment, and turns to look at Nigel.

“I guess I’ll go to the other one.”

“Don't be fucking stupid, kid.”

Adam blinks, cheeks flushed with a strange and delightful sense of hope. “But we bought two -”

He’s hushed by a hard hand curled against the back of his head, and soft lips swept slow across his own. He leans up to his toes, like he saw the boys do for the girls on their cars, and kisses Nigel harder. Sliding his arms around Nigel’s neck, Nigel steps backward to bear his weight. He releases his curls and instead wraps both arms around his middle, thick body and wrought strength supporting Adam’s slender body.

“Appearances,” Nigel whispers before his lips are snared again. “Can’t have -” Another kiss draws a growl from him. “- people asking questions. Christ, Adam!”

The kid is relentless, his sweet little whimpers goddamn deceptive when it comes to how ardently he kisses. He forces Nigel’s lips apart with his tongue. Nigel sucks it in retribution, and when Adam’s knees give way with a moan, Nigel holds him tighter against his chest.

“I didn't think of that,” Adam admits, pressing his entire form to Nigel’s before him. He's stronger, built harder, and holds Adam seemingly without effort. It feels really really good, and Adam grins.

“I’ve never been in a big city,” he says. Nigel snorts, stroking his hair.

“I can tell.”

“Or a nice hotel.”

“I don't see ‘em often either.”

“Or in a room alone with someone else.” Adam bites his lip again and sighs it free.

“Have you ever slept with anyone else?”

“In the same bed?”

Nigel sucks his lips between his teeth, holding them there for a moment, then releasing all at once. “Sex, Adam, fucking - fucking,” he says.

Adam shakes his head, but curls his arms tighter around Nigel’s neck.

“Touched? You know, petting?”

Another shake of his head, as a swell of crimson heats his cheeks.

“Have you ever even kissed anyone?”

To this, Adam nods, wide-eyed and earnest. “Yes,” he says. Nigel starts to sigh relief just as Adam adds, “You. I kissed you.”

It’s a bad idea. It’s a whole lot of goddamn bad ideas rolled into one. All of Nigel’s irritation with women getting attached, all his concern about what someone else may cost him in his line of work, it’s all made into a snarled mess by this. He shouldn’t. He damn well knows he shouldn’t and he could write a thousand pages why, if he could write.

But when Adam pushes up from his toes again, and their bodies brush from groin to chest… when Adam leans into him, and seeks out Nigel’s mouth beneath his own… when Nigel can taste the heat of his arousal through plush pink lips and feel Adam’s heart fluttering like a frantic sparrow against his ribs, he can’t stop himself.

No.

He won’t stop himself, not when Adam wants this as much as he does.

The setting sun paints their bodies in shadow across the floor, two forms made larger by being pressed together as one. Their bags lay ignored and unpacked, two now dedicated solely to carrying their victory in the form of legal tender illegally tendered. Nigel reaches down, following the bend of Adam’s back and pressing fingers to the dimples just above his ass, and then he grabs. Strong fingers curl hard against Adam’s rounded ass, and he groans open-mouthed into their kiss.

The sound Adam makes is at once surprising and entirely welcome. It’s loud, first of all, a whimper drawn high from parted lips rather than those softly pressed to skin. Adam’s skin heats immediately and he pulls himself back in for the rest of the kiss, pushing up on his toes high as he can go, hands turning to run through Nigel’s light hair. Nigel’s hands curl harder against Adam’s ass before they let go and Nigel ducks, just enough, to get his hands beneath Adam’s thighs instead.

Then he hoists him up.

Adam’s legs snare around him, hands still stuck in his hair and freckles still beautifully bright beneath his eyes when he pulls back far enough for Nigel to see. He turns them so that Adam’s back is against a wall, and then snares a hand in his hair to tug it.

This sound is not obscured even by lips in a kiss. Nigel shivers and curses as Adam’s voice fucking carries to the damn door, possibly even beyond it.

“Noisy little thing,” Nigel chastens him and Adam bites his lip, clinging close and rubbing up against him for more.

The coarse, unpracticed movements seek out stimulation, only stimulation, no thoughts spared for trying to appear seductive or sensual. Good. Nigel’s had that, honed motions and skilled bodies, but Adam is made more lovely by his lack of those things. Nigel leans back enough to watch the way Adam’s hips round to press their cocks together. Both their trousers poke up tented, lengths shifting pointed beneath when they rub and push, vying for space made small with every thrust.

Nigel presses him to the wall a little more securely, and with a rolling movement pins their cocks expertly between them in a languid rut. Adam’s voice cracks, splintering high. Nigel wants him to feel what he does to Nigel, to feel the friction of wool between them and the strength of the man who holds him capably aloft. Adam may be all animal need and youthful lust, but goddamn if Nigel’s not going to be patient enough make it good for him.

Who is he kidding?

He wants to screw Adam six ways from Sunday.

Another hard shove pins their bodies and mouths together, kiss split groaning against the other’s lips. Adam pulls Nigel’s hair until the man snarls, grinning, and yanks Adam from the wall. He stumbles backward beneath his weight until he finds the edge of the bed with his knees and falls back onto it. Knees spread, thighs parted wide, Adam sets his hands to Nigel’s chest and with lips slack and every breath a moan, shoves his cock hard down against him.

“Clothes,” Nigel whispers, the words scraped rough with want. “Let me fucking see you.”

Adam makes a fussy sound and brings a hand up to try work the button on his shirt free. One, two, and then he mutters something and drops his hands behind his back to yank the shirt up and off, tossing it aside.

He is little, a skinny thing with whipcord muscle and a hairless pale chest. His nipples stand peaked, tiny and dark, and just a trail of downy hair runs from his navel down to the waistband of his pants.

He is so fucking lovely.

“Not much to see,” Adam apologizes, reaching to tug at Nigel’s shirt next.

Nigel catches his hands, and brings them back to his face. He smears a kiss against each palm, stubble catching rough against tender fingertips. Up to Adam’s wrists, his forearms, along the veins that show just beneath his skin to the insides of his elbows. Adam laughs, squirming tickled at this, but Nigel continues to pull him lower and kiss him higher. He releases his arms to span hands over his back, following the flat planes of his shoulder blades and pressing. His lips part and close in open, breathless kisses across hairless skin, seeking out a nipple to catch between his teeth and suckle.

Adam’s body bucks with all the bright shock of lightning smacking from sky to ground. Head thrown back, moan pouring loud, the movement whipcracks his hips into a fierce rut downward. It’s all Nigel can do to keep him pressed close. He flicks his tongue and spreads it flat, suckles and nips and kisses noisily against the pebbled nub between his lips. Adam’s pleasure blooms rose-dark across nose and cheeks and lips, the blush spilling down neck and shoulders and chest.

“Plenty to fucking see,” Nigel murmurs when he finally relents, and Adam grabs his hair to bend him to a kiss.

Grinding his cock into the hollow between Adam’s thigh and groin, Nigel reaches up to unbutton his shirt, working it open quickly. He leans up into their tangled kiss and shrugs the threadbare cotton from his shoulders. Everything that Adam is, Nigel is not. Brute strength and broad body, sun-tempered skin that carries scars whose source Nigel can no longer remember. Hair curls coarse and greying in a broad swath across his chest, narrowing towards his stomach and then thickening again.

Adam bites his lip and makes another helpless noise. He sets a hand over Nigel’s chest and spreads his fingers through the hair there. It is so incredibly undeniably masculine, the feel and smell of him, that Adam can do little more than duck his head and nuzzle against him.

His hands are so small compared to those that flatten against his back and push down, they feel entirely ineffective. And yet… beneath him Nigel groans, grunts, arches up against him and whispers a litany of curses and endearments that make Adam dizzy.

They rock against each other, rut hard enough that the bed begins to squeak, and Adam presses the heels of his hands against the sheets with a soft whine.

“I’m going to come,” he apologizes, squirming against Nigel more.

“Slow down,” Nigel tells him, and in response, Adam shakes his head and grins. They’re too breathless now to hold a kiss for more than an instant, trembling too hard to find matching rhythms. It feels too good and so Nigel grasps Adam’s hips to settle him, hushing him when Adam whines in protest.

He inches back onto the bed, with Adam astride. When both are centered, rather than sliding towards the floor, Nigel turns him to his back and pulls the lengths of their bodies together with a groan. Adam’s skin prickles into goosepimples when Nigel’s chest hair brushes against his nipples. He hooks a leg around him and slowly it slides until his heel catches the inside of Nigel’s knee.

“We’re not in a rush,” Nigel tells him, kissing his cheek, stroking a hand down his chest and along his ribs. “No hurry. Got two nights here, if we want them. Could spend all goddamn day in bed tomorrow,” he adds with a grin, nestling another kiss just beneath Adam’s jaw.

He lets his hand run lower, to work open Adam’s belt and unzip his pants. He doesn’t grab him, not yet. He runs his hand over Adam’s belly to ease its quivering muscles, sighing against his throat when his eager clenching gives way to softness. Nigel touches Adam the way he’s imagined touching him since the diner, the way he thought he might never be allowed. He touches Adam the way that Adam deserves be touched, like something extraordinary.

He is extraordinary. He’s goddamn incredible.

Adam sucks in a breath and holds it, hands clasping the sheets at his sides, unsure if he should move or just let Nigel touch him. Just being touched is nice. It is very nice. His entire body responds to the smallest things, the gentlest stroking and the tickling of Nigel’s breath against his skin.

He lifts his hips when Nigel coaxes him to, and bites his lip harder when Nigel draws his pants and underwear off and down his thighs.

Adam has never been this exposed before, not in bed, not in front of anyone. And Nigel is looking at him with a hunger that makes Adam’s heart hammer in his throat - because Nigel likes what he sees, he likes Adam here, with him, he isn't pretending. Adam reaches up to stroke over Nigel’s chest again, another hand down over his arm, taut with muscle and sinew as he holds himself up.

Nigel tilts into a soft kiss, and breaking it with a grin, ducks his head just enough to look. Adam’s cock twitches when he does. It rests rigid against his belly, curving slightly towards his stomach. Flushed bright with blood and the head damn near purple, another jerk of arousal beneath Nigel’s attention swells a bead of clear from its tip that drips to his skin. His balls are gathered tight against his body already.

“You weren’t kidding that you’re fucking close,” Nigel laughs, and the low rumble of it melds harmonic with Adam’s high whimper.

Adam’s fingernails curve against his skin as he spans his hand closer. Forefinger and thumb encircle the full, taut base emerging from the thatch of dark hair between his legs. Nigel’s sigh breaks, wavering, as he strokes slowly upward and closes his fist to a tight tunnel around Adam’s dick.

Adam squirms again, a deliberate and jerking motion, and with a soft little _no_ comes hard all over his belly. It feels damn near endless, the pulse and heat of it, and Adam reaches blindly to grasp against Nigel above him. When he's finished, when he can see, he feels his cheeks flush ruddy in embarrassment. 

“It's never felt like that before,” he whispers.

“Christ, look at all of it,” Nigel mutters. Adam tries to laugh but the sound comes out strangled and shy. Nigel quiets him with a kiss, and then another.

With his sticky hand upheld, Nigel jerks open his belt and unzips himself. Without bothering to shove down pants or underwear, Nigel ducks his head against Adam’s shoulder and groans, reaching with slick fingers to stroke himself inside his clothes. Adam’s skin is hot beneath his kisses. Weakening ripples of pleasure appear in an outward shiver from unconsciously rocking hips, to his unsteady breath, to his trembling limbs.

With another kiss, Nigel seeks out Adam’s throat, more kisses pressed along collarbone and chest. Adam grabs his hair and pulls - as if that would dissuade him? - but Nigel merely groans as he lowers his mouth to Adam’s sternum and follows a thread of semen downward. Lips tingling, tongue spread flat, he kisses, licks, and sucks Adam’s stomach clean as the kid laughs weakly beneath him.

“What are you doing?”

Nigel merely hums in answer, and Adam returns to stroking his hands down his back, and up again to his wide shoulders. Nigel is a lovely shape, built and large. Adam likes it. He likes his strength and his power and his lack of fear in using both.

Adam thinks of how easily Nigel had lifted him. He bites his lip and drags his nails over smooth tanned skin until Nigel curses. His body unfurls from where it’s bent, laying close against Adam’s side. The movement of his fist in his pants, bumping against Adam’s hip, twists Adam’s belly into knots.

“On your side,” Nigel whispers, nudging Adam’s shoulder with his nose. Adam turns slowly towards him, but with a laugh and a warm curse, Nigel corrects him into turning away instead. He watches Nigel over his shoulder, eyes wide despite his hooded gaze.

“What are you -”

“Hush, sweetheart. Trust me.”

Nigel ducks his head and removes his hand from his pants, shucking them down to his thighs to bare himself. He curves his hand around one of Adam’s cheeks, just as firm and delicate as he’d imagined, just as plush and perfectly rounded to his grip. A hard kiss against Adam’s shoulder finds lips and teeth catching skin between, a substitute that will have to suffice for the goddamn dire need in Nigel to pillage Adam’s ass until he’s speechless.

Instead, he simply rocks against him. Cock fitted into the crevice between his cheeks, Nigel tilts his hips forward and grasps Adam’s hip to keep him close. Each stroke, tugging back his foreskin and then sliding it high again, elicits a shuddering groan from Nigel, that soon shift to gasps when the bed begins to shudder from his quickening movements. He snares his arm around Adam’s waist and pulls him tighter to his chest, making room only when curious fingers seek back between their bodies.

Adam gasps softly and spreads his fingers, feeling Nigel’s cock - thicker, heavier than his own - slip so easily against him. Every push brings a little soft sound from Adam, wanting more and deeper and _there_. He arches his back, pressing his toes to the bed to lift one leg a little higher.

That's all it takes. The motion, the deliberate and unmistakable thought behind it. Nigel grips Adam close and bites a curse against his shoulder as shuddering, he comes, up Adam’s back and between his pert cheeks. 

Adam laughs, sweet and loud and delighted. He is messy, between his own legs from his release, on his back from Nigel’s. It is warm and dirty and makes Adam blush. 

“We should do that again,” he tells Nigel. “After a nap, we need to do that again.” 

“You liked that?” 

Adam bites his bottom lip and grins, nodding. 

“Sweetheart, we’ve not even fucking started.” Nigel laughs, still rocking stroke by slowing stroke against Adam’s bottom. Only when his cock begins to soften and the friction becomes more pain than pleasure does Nigel relent, but not before reaching down to cup Adam’s ass again and squeeze it. His fingernails scrape the soft skin that meets his thighs. He spreads him a little and then releases him with a gentle clap against his bottom just to feel it jiggle. 

Adam’s sweet, soft sigh tugs Nigel’s belly so tight it hurts. 

“Stay here,” Nigel murmurs, kissing Adam’s shoulder, the back of his neck, up into his hair. Reluctantly, and on unsteady legs, he stands. Tucking himself away and buttoning his pants, he seeks out a washrag from the bathroom. It’s all shining golden fixtures and white marble, with a big tub and stacks of plush white towels. Nigel takes one and dampens it with warm water, wringing it dry before returning. 

He wipes down Adam’s back, his ass now streaked in white. When Adam rolls to his back, Nigel draws a breath. _Not much to see_. Bullshit. His slender body is all sharp angles and soft skin, hairless but for his limbs and the thatch of dark curls where his cock lays limp. Adam’s hair drapes in front of his eyes, and he blushes ruddy as he watches Nigel watching him. He’s downright pretty, if a man can be called that. No. He’s goddamn gorgeous. 

“Look at you,” murmurs Nigel. “Christ, Adam.” 

“Don’t look,” Adam laughs, squirming and trying to curl up, laughing more when Nigel sets a hand to his chest to hold him still. Adam presses his hands to his face instead, to hide it. He is so youthful here, not overwhelmed by plans and routines and deliberate things he must do in that obsessive-compulsive way that he has. 

Nigel cleans him up and bends to kiss against the still-salty skin until Adam makes a sweet sigh and relaxes into the mattress. He’s half-awake by the time Nigel gets back from rinsing the cloth and giving himself a whore’s bath in the sink, and Adam looks damn near angelic. He makes a fussy sound when Nigel rests his weight on the bed and reaches with sleepy fingers to grasp against him. 

He says nothing, but his actions speak loud enough. 

Lie with me. Sleep with me. Rest with me, so we can fuck again later. 

Eloquent little shit, for as little as he says. 

Nigel tugs the sheets up over them both, and with a rumbled groan of contentment as he sinks into the soft mattress, he turns towards Adam. Adam’s body fits flush against his own, cradled by Nigel’s thighs beneath his, an arm around his waist, and Nigel’s chest against his back. 

Maybe it shouldn’t be this easy, but hell if Nigel’s going to question it. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You smell good,” he mumbles against Nigel’s skin. “You smell like sex.”_
> 
> _“How the hell would you know what sex smells like,” Nigel snorts, burying his smile against the pillow._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by our beloved [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!

Adam wakes at seven AM on the dot, and immediately seeks for his glasses. 

The bed is soft, and extremely warm, and it takes him a moment to realize that the reason behind that is because he is sharing it with a heavy, snoring, very warm man. He is sharing it with Nigel. Nigel, who sleeps sprawled and who cuddles, and who is nothing like the brash and loud man Adam has grown to love in the car.

Adam squirms free to go to the bathroom. 

When he comes back, teeth brushed and hair brushed and face washed and hands the same, Nigel is still out cold, lips parted on the pillow snoring, expression eased and soft, making him look younger. Adam realizes he’s never asked him how old he is.

Carefully, Adam crawls back into bed, trying to lie the exact same way as he had been before he had managed free.

He doesn’t manage back in nearly so well.

Nigel stirs as soon as his arm is lifted. He lashes out so quickly that Adam makes a sound, alarmed, but he isn’t struck. He’s snared, pulled tight against the man with whom he just had sexual relations, with whom he ran away, who eats pancakes whenever he can and smokes more than any human should be able to in a day.

Adam grasps Nigel’s shoulders to adjust himself closer, pressed flush to the too-hot chest that rubs softly furred against his own with every breath. Ducking his head with a snort, Nigel snuffles through Adam’s hair and exhales roughly, settling once more.

Whatever Nigel says to him isn’t in English. It might not be in any language at all, rather than just a slur of words dragged thick across his sleep-heavy tongue. Adam tries to squirm a little from under Nigel’s heavy arm, but Nigel only holds him closer, catching Adam’s head beneath his chin to keep him caught against his throat.

Adam laughs, then, little and nervous. It’s sweet, that in his sleep all Nigel wants to do is cling close. He’s larger than Adam, heavier, hairier, and very warm. Too warm. Much too warm.

“Nigel,” Adam tries, finding that foreign words greet him again, mumbled and soft and not at all angry. “Nigel, you have to wake up.”

Nothing. More mumbling, a rub of the man’s nose against Adam’s hair when it tickles him, and a settling sigh. Adam sighs back and considers what else he can do to wake him. He could hope the man wakes up on his own, but that could be hours from now. He could hope Nigel lets him breathe a little, but he might not, in this state.

Desperate and a little giddy, Adam presses two fingers beneath Nigel’s ribs to tickle him enough for him to move, even a little.

Nigel grunts, tensing. The tweak of muscle brings Adam far too tightly against his chest and Adam gasps, laughing as he tries to wriggle free and digs his fingers in harder. Nigel’s low, purring rumble rises in pitch. He sounds like a dog, increasingly nervous of a stranger’s approach.

And then his breath hitches. He snorts, and takes another, snuffling deep. Just as Adam wonders if he’s going to suffocate against Nigel’s chest, and accepts that in the grand scheme of things, there are worse ways to die, Nigel releases him with a huff of laughter.

He grabs Adam’s probing fingers and pushes them away, muttering in what is definitely not sleep-speech but indeed a foreign language. He turns their palms together, eyes still closed, and squeezes their fingers when they lace. Pushing Adam back, Nigel rolls heavily atop him, nearly knocking the wind from Adam’s lungs, but leaving just enough somehow that Adam can laugh, sudden and startled.

“...the hell,” Nigel mutters, before sweeping a clumsy kiss against Adam’s throat.

Adam laughs harder. “Nigel!” he implores, voice louder now. “You’re squashing me. You’re heavy.”

“You smell like peppermint,” comes the mumbled reply.

“Yes, I brushed my teeth,” Adam tells him proudly, trying to wriggle free and settling on resting his arms over Nigel’s back in resignation.

“You fucking tickled me.”

“Yes,” Adam agrees, just as proud. “You wouldn’t let me breathe.”

There’s a long pause, at first considering, but then so long that Adam is reasonably certain Nigel’s fallen asleep again. He snuffles, snorting, and Adam bites his lip to contemplate how to escape, a thought that’s interrupted when Nigel shoves his arm beneath him and rolls to his side, dragging Adam with. He rolls again, to his back, and yanks Adam atop.

“Fuck,” Nigel answers, to the tickling, to the toothpaste, to the squirming kid atop his chest. He lifts his free hand to drag across his eyes and manages one barely open to squint at him. “You’re a goddamn menace, Adam.”

“No, I’m not,” Adam tells him, crossing his arms and settling more comfortably against Nigel’s chest. “You’re a menace, squishing me. I didn’t even wake you getting up. Or getting back into bed. I woke you only when you squeezed me -”

Nigel squeezes him again and Adam laughs, bright and loud, before burying it against Nigel’s chest.

“You’re doing it again. You’re terrible.”

“Terrible,” Nigel exclaims, grasping a handful of Adam’s hair with his free hand. He tugs a little, just enough to straighten his curls and shiver the kid, bending him back to bring their bleary gaze to meet. “Fucking terrible, darling?”

“Terrible,” Adam agrees in a whisper, laughing as he’s rolled off Nigel to the bed again.

“Stay over there then,” mutters the older man, turning to his side - facing away - in a tangle of sheets that he tries and fails to kick free from around his legs. “Go… brush your teeth some more. Terrible, he says. Christ.”

Adam laughs more and immediately loops his arms around Nigel’s neck, pressing up against him to spoon this way instead. “I’ve already brushed my teeth,” he says. “Why would I need to again?”

Nigel snorts but doesn't turn back around. Adam continues to nuzzle him, breathing him in, spreading his hands against the man’s collarbones to feel the hair there. Adam thinks of the night before, being touched, being wanted… and he had made Nigel feel good too. Just by being seen. Just by being himself.

He has never done that before. Not with anyone.

“Are you going to stay angry at me?” Adam asks him. When Nigel doesn't reply, Adam hums and leans further into him, trying to crawl over him like Nigel had over Adam. “You smell good,” he mumbles against Nigel’s skin. “You smell like sex.”

“How the hell would you know what sex smells like,” Nigel snorts, burying his smile against the pillow, for as long as it takes him to temper the sound of it from his voice. Adam’s heart beats quick against his back, their bodies slotted together, with Adam’s more slender form pushed flush against the great, warm, hairy expanse of Nigel.

“I’ve had sex.”

“Bullshit.”

“I have. We just did last night.”

Nigel can’t resist grinning this time. He reaches up to loosen Adam’s arm from over his neck, and bring it over his ribs instead. He squeezes slender fingers against his heart, humming low with pleasure when the kid spreads his fingers and kneads against him like a kitten.

“I smell like you,” Nigel decides, belly tightening as Adam’s stroking touch spans down over his stomach. “Before the toothpaste.”

“Does that mean I smell like you?” Adam asks, setting his chin against Nigel’s shoulder and turning his head to nose behind his ear.

“Mm - there's a fucking thought,” Nigel mumbles, shifting to encourage Adam's hands down between his legs. He's already half-hard just from being awake, but feeling Adam behind him, pressed lithe and warm and lovely to his back, just a little hard too, almost does him the fuck in.

“I like your smell,” Adam decides, innocently stroking the hair between Nigel’s legs. “And if I smell like you that makes me yours. Did you know that in nature, animal pairs recognize each other by smell?”

“We’re not animals, Adam, we’re humans.”

“Humans are a kind of animal,” Adam grins, and Nigel takes the correction in stride, especially when it’s followed by the tip of Adam’s nose drawing tickling up behind his ear again. “They mark each other as their own, and then they know their mate by that.”

Nigel draws a breath that stumbles short and sinks low, when Adam presses a little harder through the coarse hair curling dark between Nigel’s cock and his thigh. His length twitches, swelling flushed, but Nigel only curls his free hand against the sheets. He won’t make Adam touch him. He wants Adam to do that all on his own.

And when he does, fingertips brushing softly against the base of his shaft, Nigel pours his moan against the pillow.

Adam hums pleased against him, and Nigel can feel him grow hard against his back too. Cock stiffening in gentle pulses, he rubs in little thrusts against the ridge of Nigel’s spine. It is extraordinary how this shy kid can be so bloody confident when it comes to sex.

He loves it.

Adam curls two fingers and his thumb around Nigel’s cock and strokes him slowly, just once. “You're much bigger than me,” he says. “I like it. And you have a foreskin.” He deliberately tweaks the little flap of skin as he says it, coiling up and pressing to Nigel’s back again. “I really like it. I don't have one.”

"I know," Nigel says, the words little more than a grunt, warmed by the huff of laughter that follows. "Do that again."

Adam ducks his head, nose pressed to Nigel's shoulder. His fingertips tease around the delicate skin that covers Nigel's penis, soft as velvet even as it stretches around his thickening length. He gathers a bit of the tender, wrinkled foreskin where it gathers at the tip, and tugs lightly. A bead of wetness smears between the pads of his fingers, and Nigel moans, hand tightening to fist the sheets.

He licks his lips apart and sighs, hips curling forward to thrust against the uneven touch that explores the length and girth of his cock. Adam spreads and squeezes his fingers around the head, beneath its flared corona. He traces the veins that run atop and below, through which he can feel Nigel's pulse beginning to speed. Past the thicket of dark hair at its base, he bends to reach and cup his balls, holding them heavy in his palm.

"Christ," Nigel moans. It's as if he's never been touched before. Not grabbed and tugged, jerked off with a bit of spit and a bored expression. This isn't at all how it feels when Nigel pays someone to pleasure to him.

He wonders idly if he should tell Adam he was right, and he laughs at the thought.

“Does it feel good?” Adam asks, laughing warm against him, too. “I want to make you feel good.”

“Feels fucking amazing, darling.”

Adam closes his eyes in feline pleasure and continues stroking Nigel off. He doesn't do it hard enough to get Nigel off, but enough to have him seek more with impatient hips and grunts of need.

“Can we stay in bed all day?” Adam asks him, pressing messy kisses to Nigel’s shoulder. “I want to touch you all day.”

Nigel nods, grinning crooked, his eyes closed so that he can focus his other senses more on Adam. His cock, smaller and more curved, juts against Nigel’s back, prodding stiff each time Adam’s hips bend in time with Nigel’s own. There are so many things he wants to do to this kid, so many things he’s imagined over their months together. He wants him flushed and splayed bare, he wants Adam’s rosy lips slick with spit and his cheeks spattered with semen. He wants to know him, his hands and his mouth and his ass and every part that Adam will let him know.

He wants to be known.

“There’s so much I want to show you,” Nigel murmurs, reaching between his legs. He rests his fingers over Adam’s own but doesn’t squeeze or speed his touch, made to shiver by simply feeling the movement of the kid’s slender fingers around him. “So much, baby, for you to learn and for me to teach you.”

“Teach me,” Adam whispers. “Show me.”

With a helpless sound, Nigel releases Adam’s hand. He spits into his palm, and stretching back to grasp between them, catches Adam’s dick with slick fingers. “Get it wet,” he mutters, when he finds their position too tangled to do it well enough himself.

Adam squirms back just enough to see, and slips his hand down to stroke himself. He's leaking too, slick heavy drops that he uses to wet his cock. He wants Nigel to turn around so he can touch them both together again. He wants Nigel to turn around so he can see Adam sticking himself up.

“I’m pretty wet,” he says after a moment, laughing. “Really wet actually. I can't stop responding to you, my entire body does.”

“Good,” Nigel sighs, because it is - because it really goddamn is. “Good, now just - fuck.”

He twists his arm back again between them, and Adam lifts his hand from his cock. Nigel curls his fingers around it as best he can, bending his back and pushing out his hips. He lifts his higher leg, tucking his toes around Adam’s calf. With a grimace and a grunt, he aligns their bodies, Adam’s cock against his opening, and groaning, starts to sink back.

“Slow,” he whispers, words rough with sex and cigarettes and sleep. “Push in slow, baby.”

Adam blinks wide, lips parted and jaw slack. For a moment he can't move at all. He had thought they would touch, or talk, or play like the night before, but this… this is incredible. 

“I’ll hurt you -”

“You won't, darling, if you go slow.”

“Are you sure you -”

“Adam!”

Carefully Adam curls himself forward, lips parting in sympathy when Nigel groans again. He's so tight. Adam should have guessed, logically, that he would be, but the reality is so different. Good different. Definitely good different.

“Oh…” is all he can manage for a moment, breathless and weak.

It does hurt. It aches, this stretch that feels almost goddamn unsafe and makes Nigel’s heart jerk into a faster rhythm. He can count on one hand the amount of times he’s wanted someone to do this to him. Half that accounts for the amount of times he’s let it happen. But with Adam, his Adam, his wild-haired gun moll with the big blue eyes and a brain that never rests, Nigel wants to hurt. He wants to ache for him.

Because of him.

He wants this sting to linger long after they’re done fucking, and to know that it was Adam that caused it.

Nigel swears against his pillow, but the flare of tension fades into a shudder. Rippling shivers of pleasure from the back of his neck to the bend of his toes, he tightens around Adam and eases when his moan jerks high to a whimper. Adam clutches Nigel’s hip, curling closer against him, entering in slow, hot inches to spread that firm pressure wide.

“Christ, Adam.”

Adam makes another pitiful noise and almost begins to apologize. But he can't force those words either. He isn't sorry. He's sorry it hurts, he's upset it will have Nigel wincing, but he isn't sorry he gets to see him like this, and feel him like this, and -

“Nigel, you're really tight,” he sighs, gently easing back before pushing in again. “It feels -”

“Goddamn incredible,” Nigel finishes for him, before a low snarl curls past his clenched teeth and he forces himself to relax. He makes his muscles relent, easing to allow Adam inside him. His little cock feels impossibly thick now, unyielding and hard. Their shared spit slicks the way enough that the worst of the friction is soothed, but hardly so much that it doesn’t still burn.

Nigel loves it.

This is how he wants to be fucked, with pain and pleasure in equal parts. He doesn’t want tenderness, or to be treated like he’s fragile. He wants to feel that he can take this and anything else, and show his partner that he can, too.

A tug of tension tightens him again, and both men moan in unison.

“Little faster, darling,” he breathes. “A little harder.”

“I didn't know we could - could do this,” Adam admits, hair slightly damp with sweat as he presses it between Nigel's shoulders. He obediently moves faster and feels himself press harder. It feels good.

Nigel feels good.

Nigel feels amazing. 

Adam tells him so and smears a kiss against the back of his neck. Small hands seek down to Nigel's cock again and find it stiff and leaking and Adam purrs in pleasure against him. Nigel meets Adam’s hips with his bottom, pushing down as Adam rocks upward against him. He tightens as Adam draws out, spreading heated sighs between his shoulders.

It isn’t the easiest position to do this in, it isn’t the most comfortable for either, but god, it feels good. They find a tempo together like the beat of their hearts, like breath, like blood. Bodies meeting with a snap of skin, drawing away slow to pull their voices long. Adam clutches Nigel’s cock tight, each thrust of his own driving Nigel into the firm tunnel of his fist.

Nigel curses. He praises. He begs and he shudders for Adam not to stop, speaking with muttered words and trembling body. Adam doesn’t stop, he listens just like he does when they’re on a heist or fleeing one. He shoves his bony hips hard against Nigel’s ass and Nigel snarls into a laugh.

“You like when I do this,” Adam mumbles, lost, himself in the pleasure of it all. “You like when I do this but you won’t let - you haven’t - no one’s -”

“Adam?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up, love.”

Adam laughs, bright and delighted, and shuts up, concentrating all his energy on pounding harder into Nigel, pressing against him enough that Nigel turns to his side with a groan and arches his back further.

Adam isn’t sure he can keep going much longer.

“I’m going to come,” he admits, breathless, voice lower and filthy in its roughness. It suits him more than Nigel will ever care to admit. “Inside you, and -”

Nigel pulls Adam’s hand away from his cock, but doesn’t let go of his wrist. Instead he pulls it towards the bed, rolling to his belly across the wide expanse of expensive sheets. Adam grips to him and still buried deep, brings his legs up to either side of Nigel’s own. A few clumsy thrusts jerk Nigel’s body moaning against the bed, until Adam frees his hand and sets both palms against Nigel’s bottom.

He sits back, just enough to see Nigel’s clenching muscles beneath him, the breadth of his back shiver shadows where he tenses in pleasure, the way that his cock -

Adam’s cock -

The way it disappears into his partner, emerging again still shining slick, only to be pushed back deep once more. Adam’s nails curl into the plush curve of Nigel’s ass, and he squeezes hard when his entire body snares taut and he comes, choking breathless.

Nigel curses, a continuous stream of mumbled and groaned sounds pouring into the sheets like a fountain. He shudders as Adam shudders, he coaxes more from him as he rocks his hips up and back, and his own cock down against the bed. Adam whimpers and pulls free, curling forward over Nigel again and panting quick against his sweaty skin.

“Felt so good,” he mumbles. “Felt so good I’m dizzy, Nigel...”

Adam bites his lip and strokes his hands up and down Nigel’s sides before slipping them both down between his legs to stroke him.

Nigel doesn’t stop him.

He bends, instead, pushing his hips from the bed and dragging a knee up high enough that Adam can reach comfortably beneath. Adam’s skinny body against his back, supported by Nigel’s strength, he curls both hands around his cock. One atop the other, to form a tight tunnel, Nigel thrusts hard against his fingers, his own bent white-knuckled against the bed.

He tries to gasp, but his voice breaks. He tries to moan but it’s a weak, crackling pleasure that tears the sound apart. His body jerks to stillness, but for the pulse of his cock spattering thick wet ropes against the bed beneath.

Everything hurts.

Everything is perfect.

“Adam,” Nigel groans, because there’s nothing else he needs to say more than that.

“I’m here,” Adam tells him, smiling so wide it hurts his cheeks. He strokes Nigel until he turns away and hisses in discomfort, then he lets him go and brings a hand to his face to look at the mess made against it. It’s as incredible, as unbelievable as the night before. Adam can’t quite believe that this is happening again.

“Are you okay?” he asks carefully.

“Fuckin’ hurts,” Nigel says, but he laughs when he does, and Adam hides his grin against Nigel’s shoulder.

“I tried not to.”

“You did just right,” murmurs Nigel, wincing as he turns to his side, and then his back and then his other side. Adam slides off him to lay beside, wide-eyed beneath his curtain of curls. Nigel pushes them away with the side of his hand. He kisses Adam’s brow, and the bridge of his nose. He kisses the outside corner of his eye, and a spread of freckles darkened by the sun that pours through the passenger window when they’re driving.

He holds Adam’s lips beneath his own, until his lungs scream for air and a soft sound is all he can manage.

“Thanks,” Nigel manages, eyes closed and grin wide. “I needed that.”

Adam laughs. “You needed sex?”

“I needed sex with you.”

Adam beams. Months in the car, watching Nigel and wondering, hoping, maybe something would happen. Relishing every time their hands brushed, every silly diner dinner, every time they met in the morning after being forced to sleep in different rooms.

He beams and makes a sound so close to a purr that they both laugh.

Adam never thought that he could have this with anybody.

None of the young people his age understood or wanted to understand him. No girls, no boys, no one. When they weren't outwardly cruel, they were indifferent. 

But not Nigel.

Nigel saw him from the start. Not just a kid, even though he calls him that. Not just a waiter or a student. He trusted him enough to tell him the truth. He trusted him enough to ask him to come.

And he's told him, again and again, that he's brave. Beautiful. Clever. A goddamn menace. Putting into words that Adam can understand, better than the secret unspoken languages that other people express with their bodies, Nigel says what he means. Adam believes him when he says those words.

Nigel would never lie to him. Adam knows it.

"Just gonna stare at me?" Nigel asks, rubbing his arm across his eyes but smiling from beneath.

"I was thinking," Adam answers, inching closer to lay his leg over Nigel's own, a hand on his chest. "I am now, too, but I was just then."

"About what?"

"That I'm glad you stopped at our diner, and not another."

Nigel laughs, and wraps his arm beneath Adam's neck. Tugging him closer, he turns to his side so they're facing, bodies tangled tight. Messy kisses hold firm, sweeping together with soft sounds shared by each. Nigel parts his lips only to breathe, grinning as Adam leans in again and Nigel barely avoids it.

"All day," he promises. "All day we're going to lay like this, darling. Until they goddamn throw us out."

This time when Adam tilts his head close, Nigel doesn't resist.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In truth, and in the two days spent getting screwed senseless by Adam, Nigel forgot they’d ditched their car along the highway and walked into Dallas. He forgot, too, until Adam mentioned it again, that he had prior to Adam been trying to get the hell out of Texas. What a happy distraction Adam has been._
> 
> _What a liability, and responsibility alike._

“Nigel.”

The man stirs, kicking out with his foot to turn over to the other side. A shake given to his shoulder curls his lip and he mutes a curse against the pillow. The depth of his own snore nearly awakens him more fully, but what that doesn’t manage, Adam does with his weight sinking the bed sideways and another shake.

“Nigel, look - we’re in the paper.”

 _Now_ Nigel’s fucking awake.

“What?”

“We’re in the paper,” Adam repeats, rustling the document in question as he shifts to sit more comfortably in bed. “It was delivered up to my room with breakfast this morning. There was one by yours, too, but I took that away to make it look as though both rooms are being used.”

Details. Always insignificant goddamn details with this kid.

“Adam,” Nigel growls, bringing a hand up to rub his face. “What the fuck does it say about us in the paper?”

“It doesn’t mention us by name, but I doubt anyone else is robbing banks as quickly and successfully as we are,” Adam says, infuriatingly still not reading the damned article as he shifts around on the bed beside Nigel. “‘Two men, never masked, as of yet unidentified -’”

“Thank Christ.”

Adam pauses. “Are you religious?”

“Not in the fucking slightest,” Nigel says, grasping blindly for the paper. His fingers snare Adam’s side first, and the kid snorts a little laugh, tickled. He lets Nigel take the paper from him, and squint at it with bleary eyes.

The sketches are close, but not precise. Were someone to hold the images up beside them both, they might draw the parallel - in the scar on Nigel’s nose and Adam’s curls - but the jaws aren’t right, the eyes aren’t theirs. It’s thin comfort.

Nigel snaps the paper closed and lets it flutter to the floor, grinding his palm against his eye.

“We gotta go,” he mutters. “Out of Dallas. Today.”

“Why?”

“Because our picture’s in the fucking paper, darling, that’s why.” Nigel arches in bed and groans when his back clicks. When he settles back to the mattress he doesn’t look as though he’ll move anytime soon, eyes closing again and lips parting on slow breaths. “Means they’re on to us, at least on to where we could be and that’s fucking dangerous and not worth our time.”

“Is that why you were going to leave the state after your steak at the diner?”

“Yep.”

“Is that why you usually stay in cheap motels?”

“Yep.”

“Is that -”

“Adam,” Nigel groans, turning his back to him again. “Shut up for a second.”

The younger man sighs but doesn’t complain.

Precisely sixty seconds later, he starts speaking again. “Where would we go after Dallas? We don’t even have a car anymore. Will we catch the train?”

In truth, and in the two days spent getting screwed senseless by Adam, Nigel forgot they’d ditched their car along the highway and walked into Dallas. He forgot, too, until Adam mentioned it again, that he had prior to Adam been trying to get the hell out of Texas. What a happy distraction Adam has been.

What a liability, and responsibility alike.

Nigel claps his hand down onto his cigarettes beside the bed, slipping one out of the packet and tucking it into the corner of his mouth. He lights it, drags deep, and sighing smoke catches Adam by the back of his neck to bring him close. He tucks kisses across his brow, nosing against his hairline.

“Get your things together. We’ll take a train down Houston way and hop off halfway. Find another car, and make for Louisiana. Once we’re out of Texas, they’re out of their bullshit tinfoil sheriff star jurisdiction. Once we’re in the swamps, no one’ll dare come hunting for us.”

“That will be dangerous, won’t it?”

“What will?”

“Jumping trains and going into swamps.”

“Course it will, love,” Nigel grins, holding his cigarette out of the way as he nuzzles behind Adam’s ear. “You’re with a very dangerous man, now.”

Adam snorts but doesn’t deny it. He’s seen Nigel with a gun, he’s seen Nigel in a situation where he is cornered, or Adam is. He is certainly dangerous, and he is clever, though he will snort if Adam were to tell him. He supposes he could be with a far worse companion for a trip across the United States.

“Will I be a dangerous man?” He asks.

Nigel laughs, wrapping his arm around Adam’s neck and dragging him down to lay atop. He pushes smoky kisses through his curls, and hums when Adam spreads his hand over Nigel’s bare chest, curling his fingers through his chest hair.

“The most dangerous,” Nigel agrees, taking a quick drag and stretching to ash his cigarette. “You won’t even need to do anything, darling. That’s what’ll scare them. They’ll see what I can do and wonder if you’re holding back, and know that you’re the real mastermind, my dangerous angel.”

Adam laughs and squirms against him, settling small and warm to Nigel’s chest as he smokes. He still smells of sex and sweat, of coffee and old cigarettes. Adam is so used to that smell he wonders if he could ever forget it.

“I think we should shower,” Adam says after a while. “Pack our things and use the back door. I don’t know how far the station is but we can probably get there fairly quickly - you walk fast, your legs are longer than mine.”

“Should I carry you, love?”

“That would be conspicuous,” Adam points out, frowning as he turns to look up at Nigel.

“Good point,” Nigel agrees. He tries to fight down a smile, as if he’s being very serious indeed, and fails at it. “I’ll carry your things then. That’ll slow me down enough for you to keep up.”

“Alright,” says Adam, his nose wrinkling as Nigel kisses him again. And again. And once more before Adam finally squirms away to go and pack up what few clothes have made it out of the little bag he carries.

Most of their weight now is cash, but still not enough that Nigel’s ready to call it quits. It isn’t greed that drives him now - certainly he could pay Adam out and cover the rest of his schooling, take what’s left of his own and enjoy himself into oblivion for a few months. It’s something else entirely that pushes him on, driven by the rising dread - like bile in his throat after a binge - that were they to pay out now, Adam would return to school.

And Nigel would be alone again.

“Move it,” Nigel says, dropping his feet with a thud to the side of the bed, and helping to stuff his scattered clothes back into his satchel.

It’s goddamn early when they make it out of the hotel, their rooms already paid for, booked for another night that they won’t be there. Precautions on top of precautions, and still their drawings in the paper. Poor as they are, they’ll be refined once they bust up another bank. With one stumble comes the next, until the Devil’s on their heels.

Nigel hoists Adam’s bags higher, and they part the early morning workers that fill the city’s streets to make their way to the train station. He gives Adam money for Galveston. At another window, Nigel gets a ticket to Houston. They’ll board the same train, and skip off at Conroe, snatch a car up out of the lot, and be in Louisiana by morning.

They wait for the train as though they don’t know each other, they enter different cars. Adam sits with his bags and waits, feet kicking beneath the seat, until the train announces its departure and begins to move off from the station. He doesn’t turn to look at anyone, he doesn’t do anything but reach for his book and curl his feet beneath himself to get comfortable.

Presently, someone enters the car and tosses a large duffel into the overhead compartment next to Adam’s. He looks up, for a moment concerned, then eases his expression when he sees who it is.

“This seat taken?”

“No,” Adam bites his lip and pretends not to be delighted by this game between them as Nigel takes a seat and stretches his legs out. He closes his eyes, as if to sleep, but after a moment he cracks one open. There are few enough other people in their car, and with the ruckus from the wheels clattering beneath, their voices are easily masked if kept quiet.

“And you?” Nigel asks. Adam blinks up at him.

“Am I taken?”

Nigel hums, already half-asleep, but with a smile spreading sly.

“I’m being taken to Houston,” Adam offers, brow creased in confusion.

“But are you taken,” says Nigel. He rubs his nose to hide his grin. “By anyone in particular. What is the phrase - fuck,” he laughs, low. “Going steady.”

Adam blinks at him and snorts, hiding his smile and blush behind his book. It’s a good question. No one has asked him to go steady before. Nigel hasn’t asked him to go steady with him. But considering they’ve shared kisses now, a bed, each other, surely that means they are?

“I don’t know,” Adam admits after a moment. “No one’s ever asked.”

It’s a fair answer. Nigel lifts his brows and closes his eyes again, settling deeper in his seat. Their knees touch, but not so much that anyone passing by would see it as anything more than Nigel taking up more space than necessary. A bit rude, but nothing suggestive of the spark that catches warm between them at the contact.

“Would you?” Nigel asks, when he hears Adam turn a page again.

“You’re interrupting me on purpose.”

“I am,” he agrees. “Would you go steady with someone?”

“That depends on who asked me. No one’s asked me.”

“You could ask, too,” Nigel suggests, his teasing gentle, not enough to rile Adam in confusion, but obvious enough that Adam knows Nigel is being playful, rather than cruelly obtuse. “Would you say yes?”

“If someone asked?”

Nigel hums.

“Who’s asking,” Adam asks, exasperated.

“Me.”

Adam bites his lip and wriggles lower in the chair, drawing his feet forward, too, trying to reach Nigel’s length without falling off his seat. His entire body feels aflutter with lovely sensations and he wants to laugh, to squirm more and press to Nigel and say yes, yes he is most certainly saying yes.

He swallows instead. Affects a shrug. “Sure, I’ll go with you.”

“Will you?”

“Wherever you go,” Adam confirms. “Will you give me your jacket?”

Now it’s Nigel’s turn to be confused, eyes opening and brow creased. “My jacket? Why do you want my jacket?”

“That’s how you know.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“That’s how you know when someone’s going steady with someone else. The boyfriend gives the girlfriend his jacket to wear,” Adam explains. Nigel regards him with narrow scrutiny damn near to suspicion, but of course - as always - Adam’s being entirely earnest.

“You’re not a goddamn girl, darling.”

“And I don’t have a jacket that will fit you, so I will have to wear one of yours,” Adam replies, seemingly unmoved by such an idea of gender roles. He watches Nigel over the top of his book and grins behind it again when the other narrows his eyes at him. Had he always thought the man so handsome? Adam thinks he has, remembering the way his stomach had dropped like he was on a rollercoaster when Nigel had first walked in.

“I’m going to read my book now,” Adam tells him after a while, voice muffled behind the pages. “I can lend you one too, if you like.”

“I don’t read.”

Adam’s eyes stop moving over the words before him, uncomprehending. “Then how do you learn?”

“I do things. I don’t need to know how to read to do that,” Nigel grunts, sitting up straight enough that he can shrug out of his thin linen jacket, enough to look marginally respectable, but light enough for the goddamn miserable Texas summer. He shakes it off his wrists and tosses it to the seat beside Adam, before settling comfortably again.

Adam continues to watch him as though he had grown a second head. He doesn’t lower his book but his attention is clearly not on it anymore.

“What about the things you can’t do?”

“What can’t I do?” Nigel asks, settling in for a nap. Adam considers this.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But certainly there are things you can’t do. And how do you learn those things if you can’t do them?”

“Why would I learn them if I can’t do them?”

“So that you can do them,” Adam reasons.

“What if they’re useless?”

“There’s no such thing as useless knowledge,” Adam points out, curling a leg beneath himself again.

“There we’ll have to agree to disagree, darling. I can’t see a goddamn reason in the world I’d need to know about…” Nigel pauses, glancing down to Adam’s book. He stares at it, his expression as inscrutable to Adam as the title is to Nigel, and so he simply snorts, “That.”

Adam parts his lips but Nigel lifts his hand.

“I don’t need to know about it,” he amends, “because you know about it.”

Adam frowns. “But what if I’m not here?”

“Why wouldn’t you be here?”

“I don’t know, but what if I wasn’t?”

“Would I need this if you weren’t here?”

“Well,” Adam considers the heavy text. “I suppose not on the train, but -”

“Then I don’t need it, because you’re here and you fucking know it and if you weren’t fucking here I don’t need it on the train anyway.”

Adam snorts, he can’t help it. He wonders if Nigel knows how funny he is. It would be too long to explain how physics is applicable in everyday life, especially when they’re on a train, and too difficult to keep Nigel from getting angry when he doesn’t understand in a place Adam can’t kiss it better.

So he leaves it for now, letting Nigel cross his arms and duck his head and prepare for a nap as he reads his way through another chapter regarding particle physics.

Nigel snores in his sleep. Not enough to be disruptive, and broken up now and then by little snuffles and wordless muttering. It pulls Adam out of his reading a few times, and he finds that when he watches Nigel like this, a little crease between his brows even in rest, his stomach tightens and his chest aches. It isn’t at all a bad feeling, but it’s one that no one else has ever made him feel.

And when he looks too long at Nigel’s mouth, Adam feels that stomach-pressure twist lower, and he looks back to his book.

At the stop before Conroe, he awakens Nigel as gently as he can. Nigel falls asleep again, but to his credit, snaps to alertness the moment the train begins to slow in the little station. There are trees here, lots more than where Adam’s from, and taller too. It’s still early afternoon as they separate, Adam with his bag, and Nigel with his, through different doors on the train. Though they’ve never practiced this, Adam learns quickly, following Nigel’s lead and remembering an early admonition that unless Nigel says otherwise, if they’re in public, they’re meant to look apart.

It’s like playing pretend. Adam’s never done that before. So he thinks of it like doing what a teacher asks, instead, with guidelines and rules to follow. As long as he does what Nigel tells him, he’ll be fine.

They both will.

Nigel may not know physics, but he knows a lot of things.

And when they finally reconnect outside of the station, Nigel sends him a quick smile and without missing a beat, trots down into the parking lot. Bag slung across his shoulder, dust kicked up under his boot heels, he chooses quickly a modern car and tests the handle. It clicks open, and throwing his bag into the back, he ducks inside.

Adam follows.

All they need to do is get the car started, once they have, no one would question two people driving away from the station with their bags in the back, surely? Adam doesn’t interfere, he tries to find a way to sit comfortably in this car as he had in the other one, the one Nigel had kept all the way to Dallas. It hadn’t occurred to Adam at the time that the car wasn’t actually Nigel’s.

He’s stretching his arms up towards the roof of the car when something catches his eye. People are milling around, some meeting families, others meeting friends, others still not meeting anyone, but one person in particular is watching the car with an expression of outrage and confusion.

Adam frowns back.

“Nigel?”

“Just a minute,” Nigel answers from the floor of the driver’s seat, working quickly to rig the simple wiring together. He shocks himself and curses sharply, before trying again.

“Nigel,” Adam says. “Nigel -”

“Just a goddamn fucking minute -”

“Someone’s coming.”

“Who’s fucking coming,” snarls Nigel, but the displeasure becomes a single brash note of laughter as the car rattles to life. It purrs sputtering beneath them, and Nigel sits up just as his shirt collar is grabbed and he’s jerked to his feet.

“What the fuck?”

The man is taller than Nigel, broader, his face round and his neck thick. He’s not fat, so much as generally wide. He’s goddamn imposing and Adam isn’t sure if his reaction was based on seeing the man or not seeing him. Both would be quite accurate.

“Nigel,” Adam tries again, tone just as infuriatingly patient as before. “I think we climbed into this man’s car.”

“Goddamn right you did,” the guy replies, eyes furious and narrowed and piggish as they return to Nigel. “Simple mistake was it? A fuckin’ coincidence? Lemme guess, you have one just like it at home?”

“No, just in the lot,” Nigel replies, shrugging, turning away as though to squirm free before landing a sharp blow beneath the man’s chin. It’s enough to have him released but not enough to give Nigel space enough to get back into the car and drive away. He turns to Adam to gesture that he stay inside, that he doesn’t try to do some dumb heroic thing and climb out to let the man have it or - worse - to help Nigel out.

“Gimme a fucking minute,” Nigel says again, turning when he hears the shrug and shuffle of clothing behind him. A fist collides with the side of his head and the edge of the car door with the other, and for a few strange moments that feel like floating, Nigel sees nothing at all.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It’s then that Nigel blacks out._

Fists collide with faces. Knuckles batter ribs. The ground swells and falls away beneath staggering, stumbling, twisting flurries of dust that fill the air and blur tears watering forth. Nigel surges upward with a sound ripped guttural from deep inside him. It isn’t only for himself he’s fighting. It isn’t only for his freedom.

It’s for Adam, who deserves a life far outside this shit that Nigel’s dragged him into.

He seeks by touch, not by sight. Constellations bloom and burst in the blackness of his vision and Nigel wonders if there will ever be another night again that he and the kid lay out on the hood of their car, and Adam talks for hours about all the different parts of the heavens. His fingers snare fabric and he tears it towards himself, knees driving hard to the ground atop the thrashing, ferocious body paired to his own.

Hours before, Adam wiggled atop him, seeking kisses and tickling his nose through the hair on Nigel’s chest. Hours before that, heat spilled slick between them, their moans pushed breathless past parted lips. Nigel lowers a hand to the wetness newly drained down his thigh, and wonders if he’s pissed himself.

He’s in a world of shit if he’s pissing red.

Nigel sits back to his knees, the man beneath him prone. He regards his palm, shining nearly black in the fading greyscale of Nigel’s vision. The sun reflects too brightly from it, and he squints.

The knife stuck in his side pulses in time with his heart, and Nigel looks at the man pinned under him when he sputters a foamy cough.

It’s bad. It’s real bad and they have to go before it gets worse.

The guy will live, though he’ll need a few weeks’ recovery before he’s in fighting form again. Nigel will live. Maybe. If they go right the fuck now. He sets his hand to the handle of the knife and considers yanking it out. It’ll be a bloody mess but -

“Adam!” But maybe it’s better to leave the thing in for now. Like a plug to keep that shit inside until they can get to a place they can lay low for a while. “Adam, move the fuck over.”

“To where?”

“Behind the fucking wheel, darling.”

“I can’t drive.”

“You will today.”

“But I don’t know how.”

“I’ll tell you how but you have to move right the fuck now, darling. Scoot.”

Adam shifts, nervous, and sets his hands on the wheel as Nigel lurches around the car and climbs into the passenger seat.

Nigel can’t see half of what’s going on. The space where Adam sits is a dark blur, as if Nigel had his hand over his face. He doesn’t, of course, because he’s clutching his side as if it will stop the pulsing gouts of gore spilling through his fingers. He snarls as he drops himself into the seat and jerks the door closed.

“Right side’s forward,” he manages. “Press slow. Left side’s the brake. Don’t fucking touch that.”

“But if we need to -”

“Fucking go, Adam!”

The car bunny hops its way through the lot, barely missing a few other cars and several people until they hit the open road. Adam doesn’t ask about the steering wheel, he understands how a car works, he just has no idea how to drive it.

“If you’re pushing the fucking gas keep your foot on it,” Nigel grits, and Adam looks at him, brows furrowed, before doing as he’s told. They speed up, to a speed that has Adam nervous about being able to control the car, but they no longer jerk down the gravel over and over. After several moments of hard panting and soft sounds of pain from Nigel, Adam looks over, swerving the car gently across the center line.

“Don’t take that knife out,” he tells him softly.

“Pay attention to the road.”

“If you do, you risk severing -”

“Adam,” Nigel grits through his teeth. “I’m begging you.”

“Okay, but you’ll lose blood at a faster rate, and…”

Nigel doesn’t bother again. He lets the kid talk and hopes it settles his nerves, as Nigel’s pulse thrums louder in his ears with every mile they put behind them. Each jolt of the car burns like fucking fire in his side. Each flash of sun through the leaves is blinding. He lets his good eye close and allows his pain release in a soft grunt at the start of every breath, jaw clenched and hands cold beneath the warmth that spills slowly over them.

Adam eventually quiets, and Nigel leaves the knife right where it was stuck.

“Where am I going?” Adam asks, after how long Nigel hasn’t the fucking foggiest, but he sounds like he’s speaking through water. A bath would be nice right now, Nigel decides. Somewhere warm and quiet to just fall asleep.

“What do the signs say?”

Adam waits until he sees one, marking the speed limit. The car slows a little. He reads signs until Nigel gets a handle on where they are.

“Next right,” he grunts, grimacing when he tries - and gives up - adjusting in his seat. “Keep going until you find a place that looks like it’ll give us fleas if we sleep there. You’ll have to get the rooms this time.”

Adam takes the turn very slowly, very deliberately, as much to not jar Nigel where he sits as to not crash the car into the curb. They find a motel within a few miles, the sign flickering but rooms available, and Adam pulls crookedly into the lot. He hasn’t keys to kill the engine so he waits, looking mournfully at Nigel where he sits barely awake.

“Book a room,” Nigel tells him. “Use some fake name they won’t check anyway. Hurry up.”

Adam goes. Somehow he fumbles his way with the sleepy uncaring receptionist for a room on the first floor before returning to find Nigel gone from the car. The car is silent, their bags gone. Blood is smeared down the side of it, over the seat, on the ground, but Nigel is -

“Just unlock the door, love, you have the goddamn key.”

“How did you -”

“Listened. Eaves-fucking-dropped, does it matter?”

Adam agrees that right now it hardly does. He sets the key to the lock and after a jiggle to get it unstuck they’re inside. Nigel grasps the wall and recoils at the surge of pain that comes from the motion. When he sways towards the floor, their bags still outside the door, Adam ducks beneath his arm to catch him.

“You’re very heavy,” he whispers.

“Just put me on the fucking bed.”

They manage, somehow, the few staggering steps it takes for Nigel to brace his free hand against the bed instead. Blood smears across the cheap wool cover and he closes his eyes. His eye, really. The one that isn’t busted shut.

“I need you to bring the bags in,” he breathes, pale to near-grey now. “Kick dust across the blood in the lot. Beneath the steering wheel are two wires, green and blue. Touch them together and the car will start. Take it a few miles away and drive it into a ditch.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” Adam whispers, and for the first time since they started this he sounds frightened. He watches Nigel on the bed with the knife still in his side, pale and sick and dirty, and he doesn’t want to leave the room, not even for a moment.

“What if I leave you alone and you stop breathing, or you fall off the bed, or you need something and I’m not here? I can’t leave you when you’re like this, you need someone, you need help. You need me and I’m here but if I go and move the car and have to walk back that will take time and we might not have time and -”

With a snarl and what waning strength Nigel can muster, he pushes up from the bed. Reaching for Adam, he stops only because his hand is stained near-black with blood, and instead closes his fingers together and turns his wrist against Adam’s cheek. Contact, to settle him, to let him feel the warmth that Nigel himself can’t feel.

“You think I’d bow out now, darling?” He manages to laugh as he says it, shaking his head. He touches a kiss to Adam’s brow and lets the kid tremble against him. “Not a goddamn chance. Breathe for me, love. Slow down. We just need to make sure they don’t find the car, so they don’t find us.”

“They - they won’t,” Adam says, he tries not to think about how cold Nigel’s hand is and why it’s that cold. He knows why. “They won’t find it, I will hide it. I will run it into ditch and they’ll think there was an accident and they won’t look, they’ll think you died.” Adam’s breath catches hard and he holds it for a moment.

“I’ll run back, I promise I’ll run back okay? I’ll run back and we can fix this. I just need some ice and gauze and a bandage that we can make out of the sheets, and something to sterilize the wound and a needle - we need a sewing kit. I’ll find a sewing kit. Nigel don’t die.” He says, watching him with wide eyes. “Don’t you dare f-fucking die.”

Nigel laughs, but the sound a ghost of the brash sound to which Adam has become accustomed. He doesn’t try to kiss Adam this way, so that he’d feel the swelling of his lip and taste the blood between his teeth. But he touches his lips to one cheek, and - trembling - the other.

“Promise,” Nigel says, with a curl of pain in his lip as he stands back, the hilt of the knife between his fingers, palm still pressed to his side. “Be careful, darling.”

“Don’t die,” Adam tells him again, frowning. He takes up Nigel’s jacket from his bag in case some blood smeared against his clothes. He brings the rest of their stuff inside from where Nigel dumped it beside the door. He tries to ignore the blood on the seat and the floor. He takes his time to kick the dust over the blood that dropped to the ground.

He touches the two wires together and manages to back the car out again through trial and error. It rumbles down the road, back the way they came, so that anyone following them would assume they never made it to the motel.

It isn’t hard to drive the thing into a ditch, Adam just lets go of the steering wheel and wraps his arms around his head to ease the impact. There is smoke beneath the hood and Adam has to crawl through the window to get out but he manages. He finds a heavy stick further down the way and relishes in the smash it makes against the window, hitting it again and again just to feel the impact. He screams, he thinks, but no one’s around to hear.

When he’s done he stumbles back to the road and jogs back towards the motel.

He finds there’s little the office carries that could be of use. He manages a sewing kit from her under pretence of needing to fix his pants, and a promise to return it in the morning. He finds an ice machine and fills a bucket with shavings that he has to chip free from the block. He hopes Nigel hasn’t drunk all the whiskey that he had in his bag.

He damn near claws the door down when the key sticks again and calls for Nigel plaintively through the light wood before the door finally gives and he falls through it inside, some of the ice spilling across the floor. Nigel’s on the bed, chest rising and falling very slowly. But he’s breathing. He’s still breathing. Adam kicks the door closed and crawls to him, setting his cheek against a rough bloody hand and closing his eyes.

Nigel’s fingers close a little, just a twitch, but enough to further confirm the life burning faint within him. He isn’t well. He’s far fucking from it. But the warmth of Adam’s cheek against his hand, and knowing what he’s done to protect them, stokes the dimming embers inside Nigel and he manages a faint smile.

“Hello, darling.”

“I did what you said,” Adam whispers. “I drove it into a ditch and hit it with sticks.”

“I didn’t tell you to hit it.”

“I wanted to.”

Nigel laughs, but the sound is snared short by a hitched breath and Adam hushes him, pushing his fingers against Nigel’s mouth. He sits back slowly, to pull to his side the things he’s brought to repair his friend. Adam licks his lips apart, nose wrinkling at the taste of old blood from Nigel’s hand.

“I need to take your shirt off.”

Nigel hums, lifting an unsteady hand to his buttons. Adam takes over for him, baring him as best he can around the knife still poking out of his side. It takes work, several hisses of pain and vile curses flung sharply towards the ceiling, but with a groan Nigel finds his shirt open and undershirt lifted.

“Did you drink all the whiskey?” Adam asks him, eyes up and sharp where Nigel’s are dull with pain and exhaustion. “There was a bottle in your bag.”

“I forgot I had fucking whiskey,” Nigel mumbles.

“Good. Don’t drink it. I’ll need it to keep the wound sanitized.” Adam moves from the bed just enough to dig through Nigel’s bag and find the bottle in question. He ignores Nigel’s whine to take a swig from it and instead drags up one of the pillows from the bed and takes off the pillowcase to soak it in the alcohol.

“This will hurt.”

“Everything fucking hurts,” Nigel curses.

“This will hurt because the alcohol will -”

“Adam?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t fucking care, love.”

“Oh,” Adam frowns, but doesn't continue explaining. He soaks the pillowcase and sets the bottle away where it won’t be tipped. “This will bleed when I pull it out. You’ll have to try not to move so I can clean the wound.”

“I couldn’t move if I wanted to,” Nigel says, but when Adam slides the knife out and pushes his booze-soaked rag against it, Nigel heaves upward with a silent, breathless gasp. Adam throws the knife to the floor and presses his palm against Nigel’s chest. He’s shaking under his hand, his eyes wide and body rigid. For a moment, neither moves but for Nigel’s trembling that shakes the bed, and the slow bend of his lip.

“Please lay back,” Adam whispers.

It’s then that Nigel blacks out.

He wakes up just as sore, just as filthy, and just as fucking exhausted. He has no idea how long he’s been out. He instinctively reaches for the knife in his side and finds it gone. In its stead he finds the pillowcase full of melting ice covering a neatly stitched hole, some strings hanging free but nothing like the mess he had been before. It hurts like a bitch so he stops touching it and sets the ice over it fully again.

His hands are a mess of dried blood but there is nothing fresh there when he pulls them from his side. His shirt is still half off and damp with sweat. The entire room smells of alcohol and blood, bad breath and cigarette smoke.

Nigel curses and tries to sit up, finding it much more successful now that there’s a pillow beneath his head and a knife no longer embedded in his side.

Adam sits at the tiny table by the door, pigeon-toed and trembling. His front is covered in blood, he has blood left in his cuticles, though the rest of his hands are clean. He holds a cigarette between his fingers and jiggles one foot hard enough to move the chair with it. He looks up when Nigel shifts and blinks wide bright eyes at him.

“I don’t...” Adam gestures with the cigarette. “I didn’t like it when I tried it. But you calm down when you have one so… I have one.”

Nigel takes a moment to register what he’s saying, drowsy still from blood loss and every other goddamn thing that followed. Adam is pale, and Nigel worries for a moment that he’s been hurt, too. A knife in the gut, Nigel can bear. Adam being hurt would see the world torn down with Nigel’s bare fucking hands.

“Are you smoking it?”

Adam shakes his head, nose wrinkled in distaste from the one time he tried. “Just letting it burn. Turning it over and over to see how long I can keep the ash on it.”

“Can I have it?”

With a brisk nod, Adam manages to stand and comes closer, sitting carefully to the edge of the bed. He holds the cigarette to Nigel’s lips, watching as his brow furrows and his eyes close in pleasure when he drags. The embers flare bright, and smoke disappears across his tongue, held for a long moment of breathless silence before unspooled slowly free again.

The color has returned to his cheeks, a little. Sweat has dried his hair to his brow, but he can focus now, on Adam before him. Adam makes a small sound, and with only barest consideration for his stitches, Nigel grasps the kid by the back of the neck and brings him close, holding a kiss against his brow.

Adam makes another sound but he doesn’t move away. He’s shaking, but he’s not cold. He makes no effort to hold on to Nigel when the other holds him near.

“You lost consciousness and I had to make sure you didn’t die,” Adam says after a while. “So I was talking to you while I was working so that if you could even hear me you knew I was still there and you could tell me to shut up, but you didn’t so I kept working. I had to stitch you up and my hands were shaking so it will all be crooked. You’ll have a crooked scar. I’ve only read about stitching bodies. I have never done it. I never wanted to do it. I don’t want to be a doctor -”

“Adam.”

“And then the bleeding stopped and I cleaned up everything I could and put some ice on your wound so it would numb it a little and then I took a cigarette to wait. They taste terrible. They taste terrible, Nigel.”

“Hush, baby,” Nigel purrs, taking the cigarette from Adam’s trembling fingers and setting it aside. He wraps both arms around him, one hand in his hair and the other on his back, bringing Adam’s head down to his chest. Embrace tightening on the first hitched breath, Nigel closes his eyes.

Adam sobs against him. This isn’t nervous little gasps, or quiet tears. He cries like a kid and Nigel holds him as firmly as he can, as if he could take all that fear into himself and destroy it entirely. His side fucking hurts, but this is worse. It was a mistake, bad timing and worse judgement.

He had tried to make sure Adam wouldn’t be hurt, and now can’t shake the burning bile guilt that he’s the one who did the hurting.

“You did good,” he whispers, words lost beneath Adam’s desperate, childlike sobs. “I don’t like things straight. I like them crooked. I like them bent a little. Baby,” Nigel begs, as he blinks away the heat in his eyes and lets loose a rough laugh. “You saved my life.”

Adam clings to him just as hard, digging his fingers into Nigel’s strong arms. His sobs ease a little and he lets himself be held. Slowly he relaxes to nothing at all, a ragdoll in Nigel’s arms. He goes when the older man encourages him up onto the filthy bed, and curls in a ball against him, uncaring for the blood that seeps into his clothes.

For a while he says nothing at all.

“I was really scared you were going to die,” Adam mumbles after a while, voice calmer again. “I was scared because I’ve never done more than read about something, and all I could think was that you were right, that you need to do something to learn it, that reading it does nothing, that reading it teaches you nothing and all I had done was read.”

“Shows me, huh?” Nigel laughs. “Not the first time I’ve been fucking wrong. Maybe the best time to be.”

Adam makes a fussy little sound in protest, but Nigel merely cradles him closer. He touches his lips to his brow. They are exhausted, their bodies heavy and breath slow. The room reeks of smoke and sweat and blood but together they settle.

That’s the moment Nigel decides. That moment, when Adam’s breath puffs softly against his throat as sleep takes him unexpected. And when Nigel makes a decision, he sticks to it come hell or high water, come death itself.

They’ll get out of this racket.

And they’ll do it together.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Adam fucking Raki," Nigel sighs. "Are you being naughty?"_
> 
> _"I'm being hygienic."_
> 
> _"You're being fucking naughty," Nigel assures him with a smile in his eyes. "Keep at it."_

Adam wakes at seven AM sharp, and finds the bed empty.

The room looks like a scene of a particularly gruesome murder: blood on the sheets slips to the floor in a smear, where Nigel sat before dragging himself up. There are scraps of cloth covered in mess around the bed and by the little table. There is a lingering cloud of smoke up near the ceiling since Adam hadn’t opened any windows for fear that someone would see them.

His breathing picks up and he flicks his eyes around the room, seeking for a heavy form - assuming Nigel had fallen - or a smeared handprint to suggest where Nigel could have gone. He just about falls out of bed when he hears a whispered curse from the tiny bathroom, and scrambles to sit up in bed.

“Nigel?”

“Yeah, baby,” he responds, his voice taut.

Adam forces his breath to leave him slowly, lips pursed, to settle his heart. He slides from the bed - the clean side of it - and pads on socked feet to the bathroom. He didn't even change into his pajamas last night, and this too plucks a chord of anxiety in him. His clothes feel rumpled and wrong, slept in and worn two days in a row.

He presses the door open slowly. "Are you okay?"

"Got a fucking knife stuck in me," Nigel grunts. "I've been better."

He stands before the mirror, illuminated by the morning sun through frosted glass above the toilet, bared down to his pants. The color has returned to his skin, pink along his shoulders and elbows, a warm sun-worn bronze everywhere else. He holds a cigarette dangling from bent lips as he studies the stitches Adam wove through his side, and with deep, bracing breath, reaches again for the whiskey beside him to pour across them.

His cigarette falls and extinguishes itself in the sink, made pale brown from booze and old blood.

"You got it out though," Nigel says after a moment, setting the bottle back atop the toilet with a laugh. When he brings his hand to the back of his nose to rub, he's shaking a little. "For better or fucking worse, I think I'll live."

“I’m glad you’ll live,” Adam tells him softly, leaning on the doorframe and chewing his lip. One foot presses on top of the other so he balances on the one, a precarious little sway as he tries to gain his equilibrium. “But you need a shower. If you put on dirty clothes over the stitches they could get infected. Even if you keep pouring whiskey on them.”

Nigel laughs and trembles harder for it. Adam is suddenly aware of how hungry he is, how hungry Nigel must be. They’ll need to find food soon, and without a car, and with Nigel as hurt as he is -

“I can hear the fucking gears turning in there,” Nigel tells him. “Stop thinking so much.”

“There are no gears in my head,” Adam counters. He smiles as Nigel snorts, understanding it wasn’t meant literally. He’s learning, slowly, to understand when Nigel means something and when he doesn’t. “We should take a shower.”

“We?”

“I don’t think this motel is set up well enough for more than one per room, and we’re lucky to have that,” Adam points out, bringing a hand to his lips and chewing absently at the side of his thumb. “And we both need one…”

"Adam fucking Raki," Nigel sighs. "Are you being naughty?"

"I'm being hygienic."

"You're being fucking naughty," Nigel assures him with a smile in his eyes. "Keep at it."

Adam shakes his head, eyes wide, but then studying Nigel's expression, realizes again that he's just kidding around. He sucks his lower lip between his teeth and watches as Nigel works open his trousers, one-handed, with the other set against the edge of the sink as support. There are grey hairs amidst the dark ones that taper lower and thicker beneath Nigel's navel, coiled thick around the base of his cock. Adam's never noticed them before, but he hasn't had a great deal of time to look.

He looks now, because he can.

He looks now, because Nigel's getting naked in front of him.

He looks now because they're both alive and even though Nigel flinches and spits out a curse when he bends a little too low to push his pants down, at least he's able to make that curse.

Adam cursed, too, before he went to crash the car. The thought returns to him suddenly, and fills him with a secret thought. Maybe he is naughty after all. Maybe he's a bad man too.

"Gonna start the bath or what?"

Adam blinks, cheeks heating, and feels himself smile as he looks at Nigel. Rough and gruff and filthy as he is, he is the kindest man Adam knows, the most sensitive, though he is certain Nigel would have a lot to say if he ever brought it up. Adam makes his way towards the tub, stained with years of uncleaned waterlines, and turns the taps to get the tiny shower head to splutter to life.

The water isn’t dirty, which is a relief. It isn’t cold, which is also a relief. Adam brings his hands to his bloodied shirt and starts to work the buttons free. He can feel Nigel watching him and knows he blushes darker. He wonders if Nigel can see all the tiny details on his body, now, too, when they have the time to look.

Adam is scrawnier than he was when he left with Nigel - he doesn’t eat much, or he forgets to, or he gets distracted and finds himself moaning at what Nigel’s mouth or hands can do to him. That’s naughty too. Adam stifles a laugh and shoulders his shirt off, hesitating a moment before tossing it to the floor atop Nigel’s clothes, uncaring for how messy it is.

Nigel hums, a happy little sound that Adam is glad to hear when he was so certain that he might never again. Nervous fingers fumble with his belt and zipper, unused to being watched with such attention. Still, he manages to slow down his undressing enough to peel his pants and underwear off at the same time, and when he bends to guide them down his legs, Nigel doesn’t just hum - he moans.

A soft sound. A quiet sound. Just a bit of voice caught on his breath.

“Slow,” Nigel asks, as Adam begins to stand again. He does so, hands against his bare thighs as he rights himself at half the speed he would have before. He looks across his shoulder to Nigel, to see if he did well, and finds thinned lips and hooded eyes fixed on him.

Adam’s cock twitches.

Yes, he is very naughty.

He grins and turns away again, rubbing the blush from his cheeks with the back of his hand. He steps into the tub first, and with a hiss adjusts the temperature to be more agreeable. He shivers when he feels Nigel step in behind him, taller and broader and bigger than him. Nigel sets his hands to Adam’s shoulders and he makes a soft needy sound.

There is no soap, nor a cloth to wash with, but Adam seeks for one of the smaller towels to wet and scrub with instead. He turns to Nigel first, eyes lifted beneath damp curls, and brings the cloth to his skin to start to wash the dirt and blood away.

It reveals the skin he remembers in slow trickling increments, as though a darker Nigel is melting to reveal a softer one beneath. Adam is careful not to push on bruises and just to flake away the blood that seems stuck fast. He doesn’t touch the wound - he hands the towel over before he can - but he does step nearer and kiss against Nigel’s collarbone, eyes reverently closed and a sound humming up from deep within his chest.

Nigel holds the rag out under the spray, and carefully curls his other arm around Adam’s middle. The water flows black from their skin, but leaves them renewed, in steady downpour and soft scrubbing. Nigel balls the rag to a lump in his fist, circling it between Adam’s shoulders, following the slope at the small of his back. He lets the cloth spread flat beneath his palm as he runs it along the plush, plump swell of his bottom, his smile spreading as Adam grins against his chest.

“I want to do awful things to you,” Nigel rumbles fondly, following the curve of Adam’s hip and swiping slowly down the crevice of his thigh.

“Awful things,” Adam asks, with a note of surprise. “Like what?”

“Not really awful,” snorts Nigel, grinning. “I mean, I guess it depends on who the hell you ask, but I don’t think they’re awful.”

Adam swallows. He presses nearer to Nigel and pushes to stand up on his toes for balance. He feels himself smile. “You mean it like you meant it when you called me naughty,” he guesses. Nigel’s purr is answer enough.

A play on words, maybe, a juxtaposition suggesting something that is usually bad is now good. Adam doesn’t fully understand, but he can understand that he loves the way Nigel’s voice dips when he says these things, he can understand that they are said fondly, not cruelly. When he ducks his head to suck against Nigel’s clean skin and the older man squeezes harder against Adam’s thigh, Adam likes that too.

He likes it rather a lot.

“What sort of awful things?” Adam asks him.

Nigel considers how best to phrase the litany of sinful things he wants to do with Adam, his enthusiasm dimmed a little by the truth of what he’s actually physically capable of doing right now. Maybe words and a quick flick of the wrist will have to be enough. It’s really a goddamn credit to Adam that Nigel has any interest in this at all, but he wagers that brushes with death will do that for you, an end brought precariously close and then avoided.

“I want to touch you more,” Nigel finally says, fingertips spanning past the rag in his hand to brush the soft curve of Adam’s cock. It twitches in response and Nigel grins. “And behind, too.”

“That’s not awful,” Adam grins. “You’re right.”

“I want to put my mouth on you,” suggests Nigel.

“Where?”

“Same places.”

Adam shivers, despite the hot water that falls around them. He curls his fingers in gentle scratches against Nigel’s skin. He can feel himself respond in every way - from his skin to his blood to his hearing and sight. He can feel spit gathering in his mouth and has to swallow.

This is such a primal thing, so wonderfully out of his control that he feels giddy with it.

He wants to tell Nigel similar things, that he wants to touch and kiss and stroke him, that he wants to feel Nigel clench around him again… but more than that. He wants to feel Nigel that way too, deep inside him, pressing Adam to the bed.

Another shiver and a shake of his head because he knows, he knows he won’t be able to say it properly, and Adam wraps his arms around Nigel’s middle instead, careful to avoid the wound.

“I want you to do awful things to me, then,” he says.

His words are muffled when they’re spoken, but ring clear as a fucking bell to Nigel. His breath leaves him in a vocal huff that tilts lower to a laugh. He leans back, fingers under Adam’s chin, scrubbing the road dust and dried blood from his face with a clean corner of the rag.

“Show me,” Nigel tells him. Adam’s eyes widen.

“N-No,” he musters. “No, you’re meant to be resting. You’ll open your stitches if you -”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Nigel says. “I can simply lie there and let you put me back together again. Stitch me up in a different way,” he laughs. Adam tries to lower his head, cheeks ruddy and eyes bright, but Nigel keeps him lifted enough to hold their lips together.

Adam doesn’t move, he lets himself be kissed as his mind whirls through all the possibilities of how this could go wrong. Nigel can’t hold himself up as he would need to, he would get tired and sore, he would curse and roll away and Adam would know that he did something to hurt him even when he didn’t mean to.

“I don’t know how,” he admits after a moment.

It’s so genuine, so goddamn sweet, that Nigel’s chest aches. “Alright,” he says, considering. “Does it involve being in the shower?”

Adam shakes his head, peeking upward as Nigel smiles.

“So let’s finish washing up all the filth and get out of the shower, yeah?”

Adam nods, relieved, and smiles. He allows Nigel to finish washing him, stands back as Nigel washes himself down, cursing a blue streak when he has to bend to reach his feet. Adam slips to his knees and helps him without thinking twice. He watches Nigel from where he sits, squeezing excess water from the towel as the other reaches to turn the shower off.

Adam stands up when Nigel offers his hand, not because he needs it but because he likes being close, touched, supported by him.

“So what happens now?” Nigel smiles, eyes narrowed.

“We should get out of the shower.”

And so they do, sharing the single towel between them - Nigel first, at Adam’s insistence, and then Adam next. Bare, but warmed by the muggy summer air, Nigel follows Adam from the bathroom. When he stops beside the bed, Nigel notices he’s already half-hard. Nigel stops too.

“Do we need to be in bed?” Nigel asks. “For what you want to do.”

Adam swallows, casting his eyes over the bloody mess the bed is. They shouldn’t sleep on that again, it’s very unhygienic, especially for Nigel’s side. But he doesn’t want Nigel on the floor either.

He makes a sound of discomfort and then steps nearer the bed to strip it of its filthy sheets.

Some blood has soaked through, but far less than what they had been dealing with before. It will have to do, for now. It is better than attempting to stand or sit.

“I wish it was nicer,” Adam admits, laughing gently. “Like the Dallas one.”

“Christ,” snorts Nigel. “You and me both.”

He settles to the edge of the bed carefully, upper lip bending in a silent snarl and a flash of teeth as the stitches stretch. Once down, he exhales slow, and looks to Adam.

“You should lay back,” Adam says, before Nigel can ask. Nigel grins as slowly he manages, inching back until he can sprawl wide across the bed. His cock lays against the groove of his hip, still mostly soft, but thickening the longer he looks at Adam. He folds his hands on his stomach and arches a brow.

“You should probably join me,” he says after a moment of silence, grinning wide. “Unless there’s something you want to do from over there.”

Adam shakes his head, but he can feel himself grinning again and he can’t help it. Nigel is so playful and so lovely. Just as he was the first time, and every time since. Sex has always been fun with him.

“I can’t do it from over here.”

“Then get in the fucking bed,” Nigel tells him, and Adam can’t say no to that.

“I still,” he says, straddling Nigel very carefully. “I don’t - I’m not sure how you can… when I’m -”

“It’s going to be hard to stick it in me from that angle, darling.”

“No, I don’t want to - Nigel,” sighs Adam, flustered. Rough knuckles bend against his cheek, up to his ear, and Nigel spreads his hand along Adam’s jaw as he strokes back down. The kid buries his face against his palm and Nigel instead runs his thumb over the soft, sun-pinked skin under his eye.

“You want me inside,” Nigel says, heart thudding heavy and cock jerking against his hip. “You sure about that?”

Adam squirms a little and nods, the heat in his cheeks enough for Nigel to feel against his knuckles. It is such a sweet gesture, such an innocent thing that Nigel doesn’t know if he should deny him or find a way to make this work. Normally, he’d hardly have qualms about a willing person in his bed. Normally, he wouldn’t be recovering from a fucking stab wound either.

Adam is far from delicate, he’s proven that already with heists and stitching Nigel up when he was damn near half dead. Adam is far from fragile, too, but something about him calls out for gentleness and care, and Nigel recalls that in the flurry of dust and blood, he feared not for himself but for keeping Adam safe from harm.

“I want to feel you inside,” Adam repeats carefully, just as Nigel’s mind turns to further overthinking the situation. “Between my legs, like I do to you. I’ve wanted to, and -”

“And?”

Adam shakes his head and his grin is downright mischievous. “I think when you realize how easily someone can die you want to spend every moment with them learning things and experiencing things. I will always save you, but I want to learn you more. I want to learn how this feels with you. If you want. Only if you want.”

As if there were anything else in the world that Nigel could want more.

He wraps his fingers around the back of Adam’s neck and brings him down. Their kiss meets softly, just a touch held long, before Adam nuzzles deeper and pushes Nigel’s lips apart with his own. He whimpers into his mouth, bringing his hands up to rest against Nigel’s cheeks, as Nigel spans his own down the rigid lines of Adam’s body, past bumpy ribs and peaked hips, to cup his bottom.

“Easy,” Nigel purrs, when Adam’s breath hitches at the first brush of his fingers across delicate, wrinkled skin. “Easy, sweetheart.”

Adam listens, kisses softer, doesn't buck his body. He lets Nigel touch him and holds his weight up above the larger man, determined not to hurt him more than he already aches.

The long moments waiting for Nigel to wake were excruciating. Adam thinks of how he had hoped that the smoke from the cigarette would draw Nigel awake, or that the blood would disappear like a bad dream and everything would be well again.

_You saved my life._

When Nigel presses a little harder against him, Adam moans, smiling into their kiss.

"Nice and slow," Nigel promises. "And if it hurts just say stop."

"I won't," Adam laughs, a lovely little fluttering sound. "I'm too aroused."

"No such thing."

But true to his word, and given an uncharacteristic patience from injuries that force him slower than he'd be otherwise, Nigel is careful as he teases Adam open. A fingertip first, pressing against his round, tight little muscle. Then a breach no deeper than his fingernail. Spit slicked across his finger before he works it in to the knuckle, then further, in and out as speckles of blotchy scarlet bloom blushing over Adam's cheeks. His lips flush to a torrid pink, parting kiss-swollen with every moan.

Nigel adds a second finger beside the first, and when he spreads them slowly apart, Adam makes the most beautiful sound Nigel's ever heard.

A shivering, whimpering thing as Adam arches back against Nigel’s hand and opens his eyes just enough to see Nigel beneath him. He’s tense and trembling but every sigh and every shift tells Nigel that it’s nerves and nothing more.

Adam wants this.

LIttle naughty lovely thing that he is, he wants this.

Adam shoves back and with a gasp pushes forward again, lips meeting Nigel’s in a groaning needy kiss. 

“Your fingers feel good,” Adam tells him. “They’re bigger than mine, mine wouldn’t feel this good.”

Nigel all but purrs at the praise. Arching upward to stroke his cock along the warm groove of Adam’s thigh, a twinge of pain flickers across his brow but it pales in compare to the heavy pleasure that softens his features. They kiss, increasingly rough and increasingly clumsy. Nigel twists his fingers deep, splays and works them out again, presses inward and curls them to rub.

If he didn’t know that smooth little nub by touch, he’d know with certainty he found it by the look on Adam’s face. Lips parted wide on a silent moan, filled with no more than a bare breath, his eyes flutter closed and his head bows. Adam’s cock leaks a thin, slick trail to Nigel’s belly, and though his muscles clench around Nigel’s fingers, it’s not in resistance.

He laughs a little, almost shy. “Oh,” sighs Adam. Now he understands.

Nigel huffs a laugh against his hair. He removes his fingers and several times over, slicks his cock with spit until it’s pooling in his pubic hair. Adam rocks against him, cock poking against Nigel’s flat, furry stomach, and Nigel bucks up against his own hand as he watches his Adam above him.

“I’ll hold it still,” he says, voice rough. “And you can sit back as slow or as fast as you like. I won’t move until you tell me.”

Adam nods, distracted and breathless and lovely, eyes barely open and cheeks hot with pleasure. The bed creaks beneath them, old and worn out and cheap, in this place in the middle of nowhere.

Adam licks his lips and ducks his head to watch Nigel's hand on his cock, he shivers and squirms and nods his head again before lifting his eyes to Nigel's once more. He is covered in a thin film of sweat, clean and slick, lips bitten red and eyes glazed.

He smiles.

“Okay,” he whispers.

Nigel adjusts a little, spit-slick hand guiding back one of Adam’s thighs, then the other. Adam looks across his shoulder and down his back, voice jerked to a pretty little note as he sees the scarlet head of Nigel’s cock standing pert against his ass. He lifts it, attention turning back to Nigel when the man groans low from even that simple stroke.

Eyes hooded, gaze held on Adam, Nigel aligns himself and jerks a nod, once.

If pain can be exquisite, Adam thinks that this is certainly it. There is a significant stretch, there is an anticipation of it hurting more, more, _more_ until pleasure seeps beneath and takes over and he can barely breathe. He can barely hold himself up over Nigel, but he does.

He doesn’t want to hurt him. Not after he saved his life.

He manages a whimper, another, and a laugh, before pressing a hand to his face. He forces his body to relax - as he had for Nigel’s fingers - so he can sit further back, taking more of Nigel in as both groan at the feeling. True to his word, now as before as the time before that, Nigel does not push up into him, though Adam can feel him tremble in resistance to doing so.

Slowly, in inches and gasps, in moans and shudders, they find a rhythm. Each time Adam rocks back he takes Nigel deeper inside him, filling him in a way he’s never felt before, not unpleasant but a welcome discomfort. Nigel is inside him. The thought sings through Adam’s blood and makes his heart beat faster. They are sharing Adam’s body together, and making the other feel good in a way that Adam could never have imagined.

Then again, he couldn’t have imagined someone like Nigel, either.

Hard hands curl in his hair and bring him down to meet Nigel in a rough kiss, before Nigel loosens one to seek out Adam’s cock between them. Adam can’t kiss, then, at all - he can only moan as the pleasure coils tight in the pit of his belly, snaring harder each time he moves forward into Nigel’s hand and back onto his length.

He won’t last long.

He tries to tell Nigel but all that he manages is another helpless noise before he sinks into a kiss against him and works his body in every possible way he can think of to bring Nigel to the same level of euphoria that Adam currently feels.

He needn’t try so fucking hard.

“Gonna - I’m...” Adam laughs and buries his head against Nigel’s neck, panting hot and quick against it. “Nigel.”

That keening sweetness is a step too far, and Nigel loses his footing. With a sudden stillness and a resonant groan, his cock swells, filling Adam with rope after unspooling rope of wet warmth. He mutters something between his teeth that sounds like an apology but breaks into a laugh.

Nigel hasn’t finished so quickly since he was a goddamn teenager.

His hand shifts up along the twitching shaft of Adam’s cock. Corkscrewing his fist, he encircles the head and pushes slowly back down again. Again, and again, until Adam’s breath is nothing but lilting whimpers pressed between his teeth and bitten bottom lip, and his trembling rises until he’s shaken to a sudden stillness.

Wide blue eyes fly open, and Nigel bears him down to kiss as heat streaks across his stomach.

It is overpowering and incredible, enough to steal Adam’s breath and have him gasping when Nigel frees his lips again.

Adam moves forward and feels Nigel slip free, gasping at the emptiness that follows. With a laugh, he squirms to Nigel’s uninjured side and presses against him, trembling and little and completely delighted. When he meets Nigel’s eyes, he looks damn near enlightened, and Nigel knows, he bloody well knows, that this is the kid he will do anything for. Give up everything for.

And fuck if that isn’t a goddamn relief.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _With a steadying breath and his lip held briefly between his teeth, to taste Adam’s lingering kiss, Nigel turns to the door. His heart beats deafening in his ears, but their voice cuts through giving an order to break it down._
> 
> _He wishes it didn’t come to this._
> 
> _He supposes he knew it always would._

There are no more banks and no more cars. No more dust caught in the teeth of the zippers on their bags. There are no more screeching tires and sweltering sun beating down on the radiator to overheat it. There’s no more beer and cheap motel rooms. There are no more lies.

There’s just the constant beating of Adam’s feet against the cracked dry earth and the pounding of his heart in his ears and his own breathing pushing burning against the edges of his lungs...

Or maybe it’s fists pounding on the door.

Adam jerks awake and presses his hand hard against Nigel’s chest beneath it, feeling his heart beating just as quickly. Blue eyes meet dark and Nigel narrows his own before gesturing with his chin for Adam to climb from bed and dress. With a fluid strength that betrays no sign of injury, Nigel slips his feet from the other side of the bed, and pads naked to the door. Just as he lifts his hands to brace against it, another knock hammers down.

A glance to Adam finds his eyes wide, but when Nigel mouths _now_ , Adam moves.

There are voices, low and wary, from beyond the door. Nigel doesn’t need to look to know the thrum of them. All pigs sound the same. But he presses his ear to the door, not daring to risk the peephole.

It doesn’t end here. It won’t. Nigel has made Adam a promise, whether Adam knows it or not, and if Nigel is nothing else in the world, he’s a man of his word.

Adam shoves his feet into his shoes and begins to gather their things, clutching their bags of ill-gotten gains and clothes alike.

“Leave the laundry,” Nigel whispers, a breath so fine that Adam can hardly hear it.

Hesitating only a moment, Adam drops their things again. What has he in his bags but books and clothes and packs of money?

They can get more. Of everything, they can get more, if they both get out of here now. Adam trusts in Nigel. He trusts in nothing else but Nigel.

“What do we do?” Adam asks, voice barely above a whisper and breaking then too. His eyes are huge, as blown with pupil as they had been hours before when he had found his pleasure smeared against Nigel’s chest, but this isn’t arousal, this is something far more primal.

Nigel steps slowly away from the door, steps crossing sidelong one over the other to distribute his weight and stop the floor from creaking. He ducks, snaring up the bag with their money, and comes close to Adam. With a hand in his hair, Nigel bears him away from standing in front of the door, twisting with him into the bathroom instead.

He pushes the bag to Adam’s chest and brings their mouths together, his hands pressed to Adam’s cheeks.

“Go,” he whispers. “Take the money, go out through the window,” he says, with a nod to the dirty glass above the toilet. It’s small, but not so small that Adam can’t squeeze through it. “Walk straight away from here - don’t go around the building. Keep the building between you and them.”

“Nigel -”

“Listen,” he snarls, bent lips catching Adam’s again, muffling the desperate whimper his boy lets loose in fear. “Listen, baby.” Nigel presses his curls back from his face, grasps them, lets him feel that Nigel is here, now.

Lets him imagine, he hopes, that he will be there again.

“You need to go now. Walk straight, don’t look back and I will find you.”

Adam makes another helpless noise and lets Nigel kiss it away, eyes closing and stinging already from the tears of frustration he can feel burning there. There is nothing beyond the motel for miles, nothing but scrub and dry earth and open land.

“I don’t -” Adam starts. “I -”

“I’ll find you.”

“I believe you, but you’re hurt. You’re hurting and you’ll be alone and...” Adam swallows the hitch in his breath. “And I can help if I stay, I can help -”

“Remember what I promised?”

Adam shakes his head, flapping his hand in frustration before he brings it to his mouth to quiet another sound. He doesn’t want to be alone. He doesn’t want to leave Nigel alone.

“Hey,” Nigel whispers, peeling back his fingers to bring them to his cheek. “I promised I’d live. Remember? Now get your ass out the goddamn window, darling, and whatever happens, whatever you hear, remember what I promised.”

Nigel doesn’t hear another protest, because in an instant he’s standing atop the toilet and shoving open the painted-shut window with nothing but brute force. His stitches pull, but it’s a distant pain, numbed by adrenaline that stokes his pulse like embers stirred from the cool ash that settled at the first bang.

He takes the bag from Adam and chucks it to the ground below, then steps back. Adam starts to freeze but Nigel moves him, bodily - lifting him by the waist - to stand atop the toilet where Nigel balanced precariously moments before. He manages out halfway, feet first, and lingers for a moment on the frame before Nigel bends him back and touches a kiss to his brow.

Their eyes meet, upside down.

“I will find you,” Nigel swears, and with that, he lets Adam drop to the dusty earth below.

Another calamitous clatter shakes the thin door on its hinges. A meaningless introduction is shouted at him - sheriffs’ department of whatever godforsaken county in which they’ve found themselves. Looking for a man involved in an armed robbery.

A man.

Not two men.

One.

Nigel slicks his tongue against his teeth and grins. He makes quick work of his clothes, his side dribbling blood that he feels only as a remote warmth sticking to his shirt. His holster settles, its sweat-curved leather sinking heavy and familiar as a second skin against his shoulders. Two pistols there, loaded. His shotgun, snared from one of the bags Adam left behind. He checks that it’s loaded too, and smacks it shut again.

With a steadying breath and his lip held briefly between his teeth, to taste Adam’s lingering kiss, Nigel turns to the door. His heart beats deafening in his ears, but their voice cuts through giving an order to break it down.

He wishes it didn’t come to this.

He supposes he knew it always would.

Nigel lifts his chin, hoists his shotgun, and fires.

The next shot could be anyone’s - it shatters the door all the same. Another. Another. Wood chips fly loose in all directions as the cheap door is all but decimated. Nigel backs into the bathroom again and kicks that door shut too. It will hardly do anything to protect him but it’s better than staying fucking open to three barrels and police indifference.

He doesn’t look out the window, because he knows Adam believes him, he knows Adam is running. He doesn’t look out the window because he doesn’t need to. He promised, and he will follow.

Another shot echoes over the nothing-plains, and Adam stumbles, grasping his bag a little harder and thinking of his dream. One of his shoes is coming loose, the laces not done properly in his rush, but he doesn’t stop to adjust it. He doesn’t stop moving and he doesn’t turn.

When Adam was younger, his father had read the Bible to him, pointing out passages of particular importance, content to get into discourse with the young and curious boy when he argues that such stories couldn’t possibly be true. Adam never believed in God or the Bible, but as he runs, now, he thinks of Lot’s wife and her desperate heart that had her turn to salt.

She turned to salt because she couldn’t trust, not completely. She turned to salt because she turned around, when she was told not to.

Nigel told him to run.

Nigel said he would find him.

Nigel promised he would live.

So Adam closes his eyes and keeps going, counts the beats of his heart and the slap of his shoes against the now endless hammering of bullets in the motel behind him. The only salt he will become are the tears left behind, and those will dry up and sink into the dust and disappear as though they never happened at all.

\---

It is only hunger that finally pulls Adam back to himself, and through that snarling pain, the rest of his body comes horribly alive. It was days ago that Adam last came across a muddy little creek and was able to palm water from it. Many days before that when Adam last ate. Weeks, it seems, since he slept in comfort and without worry.

Weeks since he stopped and sat and cried at the edge of a farm road.

Weeks since he kissed Nigel goodbye, and the plains rang with the splitting thunder of gunfire.

Adam has said a lot to Nigel since they parted. He’s told him that he misses him. He’s told him that he’s a liar. He’s said in the same breath that he should never have left the diner or his school and that he’s glad he did.

His legs stab pain from calves to his bottom with every step.

He needs to find somewhere to stay, to eat and sleep and figure out where he is.

Nigel isn’t going to find him, so he might as well go home.

But he needs to eat. He needs to eat and brush his teeth and change his pants and find a train to take him home. He has the money, he needn’t even be frugal with it, but Adam finds that he would rather have not a quarter, if he could have Nigel at his side right now, cursing at the heat of the day and aching for a beer.

The diner is entirely unremarkable, and Adam barely looks at the menu when he sits down. He nods when asked if he wants a coffee. He asks for water and the pitcher to be left. He orders, in the end, a stack of blueberry pancakes with bacon on the side and curls in on himself to wait for them.

The coffee tastes like dirty water.

The water tastes like dust, and Adam doesn’t care. He drinks down three glasses before pressing his cheeks to his dusty knees and staring at nothing in particular.

He didn’t need the money. He was doing fine. He wanted the adventure, the thrill of doing something bad, and with a friend at his side who was braver and stronger to lead him. He wound up with the money, and without the friend.

What was it all for, then?

Why did he bother?

The click of the plate to the table is a rifle report in his ears and Adam nearly startles out of the booth. The waitress, tired but taking in his scruffy, dusty form with concern, asks if he’s alright. Adam nods but he can’t make his voice work, and when he says nothing more she returns to her work.

Bells chime on the door, and with his back to the wall, Adam notes the figure enter without looking up, holding the door for several more. He resolves that when his words are working again, he’ll ask for a map. Maybe he’ll hitchhike, if there’s not a train near here. He wonders what he’ll tell his classmates when they ask where he went, and if they’ll believe him when he tells the truth.

He stabs a carefully segmented triangle of his pancakes, eyes closing as he presses the fork between his lips.

“Bet they’re not as good as yours.”

The voice warms him more than the meal does, and Adam shivers as he feels his lips tilt in a smile. He doesn’t open his eyes yet, savoring every aspect of this moment that he can. When he opens his eyes he watches his plate, fork set carefully to the napkin beside it, berries leaking juice against the cheap white china. Adam’s lips tremble as he tries not to smile more, as he tries valiantly not to look up.

“This seat taken?”

Adam shakes his head, finally looking up when someone sits heavily in the seat across from him in the booth. He looks as dusty as Adam does, and somehow older for it. The dust in his hair paints it grey.

“Fucking famished.”

“You’re very late,” Adam points out softly, his voice barely above a whisper, his words almost mumbled into his hand as he turns his lips against it.

“Couldn’t show up empty-handed,” Nigel scoffs, shouldering off his jacket and tossing it across the table for Adam to see. The younger man looks at it, then back up at him and raises his brows. “Can’t be going steady if you don’t have a fucking jacket, now, can we darling?”

Adam left it, with the rest of the laundry, and to see it now beside him - to touch it with uncertain fingers is more than he can stand. He laughs, breath hitching short into a sob, and he presses the backs of his fingers to his mouth. His eyes widen as he feels beneath his hand a round tear shot through wool.

“How...”

“Don’t ask,” Nigel says, his gaze fixed on Adam before him, hands folded. “It’s better if you don’t ask.”

“But I heard…”

“Look at you,” says Nigel instead, as Adam finally turns his eyes toward him again, dragging the jacket into his lap. Nigel’s eyes are circled black beneath. He looks thinner, lips cracked dry beneath his veneer of dust. But he’s smiling, and Adam wrinkles his nose when he shakes his head. “Yes,” laughs Nigel. “I’m going to look at you. And I’m going to eat some of your fucking food whether you like it or not.”

Adam nods and turns the plate to him, gathering the jacket into his lap and pressing his lips to it as he watches Nigel eat like a man starved. He is a man starved. They both are. How many days has it been? How many hours apart? Doubts and anger and exhaustion and pain, and here they are, right where they started.

Adam licks his lips and presses his cheek against the rough wool.

“Where would we go?” He asks softly, watching Nigel reach for his coffee next, and down that in one long sip followed by a groan. The robber looks up, smile lifted in a crooked half-smirk that has Adam trembling all over, and shrugs a shoulder.

“Throw a fucking dart and see where it lands,” he says. “We have the entire country at our wheels, and all the time in the world.”

Adam can feel his chest swell and his breathing catch. He can feel his entire body respond to the promise he never thought would be kept, but has been, by the only man who has ever mattered enough to him to listen to.

“Okay,” Adam whispers, watching Nigel clean the plate with the last piece of fluffy pancake. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Endless thanks to our Unicornmama [Solamentenic](http://wiith-my-hands.tumblr.com/) for all your support, ideas, and mamacorning, and thank you to everyone who has read, shared, commented, left kudos, or at all enjoyed this wild ride!

**Author's Note:**

> Commissions? Chapters ahead? News and notes? Perks and pretty things? Check out our [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/wwhiskeyandbloodd?ty=h)!


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